[Illustration: Front end paper]





  THE PEOPLES
  OF
  EUROPE


  BY

  HERBERT JOHN FLEURE, D.Sc.

  PROFESSOR OF GEOGRAPHY AND ANTHROPOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY
  COLLEGE OF WALES
  HON. SECRETARY TO THE GEOGRAPHICAL ASSOCIATION



  LONDON
  OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
  HUMPHREY MILFORD

  1922




  Oxford University Press

  _London   Edinburgh   Glasgow   Copenhagen
  New York   Toronto   Melbourne   Cape Town
  Bombay   Calcutta   Madras   Shanghai_

  Humphrey Milford Publisher to the UNIVERSITY




CONTENTS


Introduction

1. 'Races'

2. Language Families--Introductory

3. The Peoples of Romance Speech

4. The Peoples of German Speech

5. Some Peoples intermediate between Romance and
Germanic in Speech

6. Peoples of Low German and Scandinavian Speech

7. The Peoples on the Eastern Border of Europe-of-the-Sea

8. The Slav-speaking Peoples and the Borders of the East

9. Some Phases of Evolution of European Life before the
Industrial Revolution

10. Aspects of Modern Europe

Bibliographical Note




{5}

INTRODUCTION

If there be any truth in the view that our philosophical theories
grow out of our circumstances, it cannot be doubted that the
philosophy of change, sometimes optimistically called progress, is
curiously appropriate to Europe.  The intimate juxtaposition of
small areas of mountain and plateau, of river and sea, of valley
and plain has multiplied contacts between men of diverse activities,
experience, and outlook, and has thus encouraged not only
exchange of ideas but also fermentation of thought.  Economically,
also, the trend has always been towards mutual dependence,
and the penetration of inland seas far into the Continent has
further assisted intercourse from far-off times.  A self-sufficing
community left to itself will evolve a routine and may stagnate
therein; external contacts are most important in that they may
ward off this danger.  On the other hand, it must be remembered
that these contacts may prove disastrous by breaking threads of
tradition developing towards a fuller realization of the good life.
Thus social importations into many regions of the Mediterranean
in the days of the growth of the Roman dominion were brought
about through conquest followed by transportation of the enslaved
foemen, with grievous results both to Rome and to the slaves.
Or again, the rapid growth of British trade at the Industrial
Revolution brought many new contacts that, as in the case of
Rome long before, promoted exploitation on a large scale, and
made the stories both of the factory-children of England and of
the slaves of America stand dismally parallel with those of the
slaves of ancient Rome.  In both instances the loss of social and
intellectual heritage involved in these ugly schemes is full of
fateful consequences, which worked themselves out in the case
{6}
of Rome and may be doing so in the case of Britain.  Contact
and association without alien dominations, whether personal or
regional, at any rate are of the utmost value as refreshers, and
Europe has had unequalled opportunities in this direction.

But Europe, as known in current geography, is not an effective
human unit.  In a certain broad sense it becomes one if we add
to it a good deal of South-west Asia and North Africa, so that
all the frame of the Mediterranean, Euxine, and Caspian is
included.  In a more real and detailed sense, however, we should
be careful to distinguish that portion which is intimately affected
by the sea from that part which is in the first place the threshold
of the great interior.

Europe, west of the Pripet Marshes, rarely suffers from extreme
heat, and its winter frosts are less severe and prolonged than those
of Muscovy.  The temperature north and west of the Alps varies
just enough on either side of the optimum of 60°-64° F. to
provide desirable physiological stimuli, with only short and
irregular periods when conditions are really harmful.  The
Russian plain beyond the Pripet Marshes is, on the other hand,
subject to painful extremes which seriously limit man's efficiency
in both winter and summer, and leave him but short periods in
spring and autumn for effective freshness and enterprise.  In
consequence of this, Western Europe, or we may call it
Europe-of-the-Sea, shows continuity of activity through the changing
seasons, a continuity of thought and criticism which has exercised
a powerful influence on government and social order, while the
sea, as above suggested, has promoted contacts and kept things
moving.  In Europe-of-the-Sea, at least where we do not get the
ill effects of alien domination above mentioned, we thus find that,
between the warrior leaders and the labourers, the traders and
professional people or middle class have developed power and
have acted as a cement for society on the one hand, and as organizers
for its maintenance on the other.  Spain (with its long struggle
{7}
between Christianity and Islam), Ireland (under English domination),
the Balkans (under one dominator after another and finally
under the Turk), all show historic inhibitions which have delayed
and hampered the healthy development of a society free to work
for that fuller realization of the good life.  Elsewhere it is
noteworthy that there have been many attempts, some successful for
a time and all valuable, to secure real participation by the people
in their problems of social organization, real liberation from the
inhibitions involved in government by a superposed class or
group.  In spite of the difficulties of the present generation,
the tendency is for these attempts to gain in power and scope,
and to overstep the artificial boundaries of nation and state which
are becoming a bed of Procrustes for the peoples of Europe.

On the other hand, east of the Pripet Marshes the long periods
of trying climate, coming regularly in winter and in summer,
limit, for the folk who have to live unprotected lives,
the possibilities
of the effective vigilance and criticism whereby the western
European organizations are kept going.  There is actual pressing
need of a routine of tradition on which to fall back in these times
of stress.  There is also the fear of the grassland tribes tending
to keep the people organized on a traditional basis as war leaders
and labourers, while the distance from the sea diminishes trade
and the middle class, and helps to maintain localism, which in
its turn strengthens routine.  There we thus find typically a
middle class largely immigrant and alien to the military and
labouring classes, and this further complicates the problems of
social development and organization.

Europe, east and west, thus shows striking contrasts which have
fateful consequences; there are also contrasts of importance
between north and south.  The latitude of most of Europe is such
that the sun's rays strike the soil too obliquely to act chemically
upon it with sufficient rapidity to decompose fresh material for
plant growth as fast as plants use it up.  In the Mediterranean
{8}
region this is hardly the case, but in several parts the soil
possibilities are very indifferent, so that our contrast is more between
Europe and the Tropics than between north and south in Europe,
though it is a valuable clue to many of the differences between
the German plain and the Paris basin.  Broadly we may say that
our latitude has made a really self-dependent agriculture almost
an impossibility for Europe, and we note in illustration that
Bohemia is suffering sadly because foreign fertilizers could not be
imported in 1914-18.  The problem of diminishing fertility has
made itself insistent again and again in European life, and has
proved a goad to drive men to agricultural experiment on the
one hand and to trade as a supplementary source of wealth on
the other.  The contrast between Europe and many parts of
China in this respect is a profitable study, if we do not exaggerate,
as is so often done, the supposed stagnation of the Orient.

From trade the men of Europe have been lured on into large-scale
industry with the application of coal, oil, water, and sundry
other forms of power in immense amounts.  The opportunities
for domination and consequently exploitation which this
has brought are working out fatefully for us all in many varieties
of hurtful contacts, needing humanization most urgently if the
situation is to be saved for our children.

The process of change, we realize, has progressed faster and
farther in the west than in the east of Europe, which goes forward
against the pressure of severe inhibitions that make its problems
differ from our own.  At times we are content to look down upon
the wild ways of East and South-east Europe, forgetting that in
many respects, such as the exposure of severed heads recently
commented upon as happening in the Balkans, we were not long
ago at least as wild as they seem to be now.  But we must also
guard against the thought that they are merely some steps behind
us on the path we all are treading; that concept of human evolution
as a procession along a path is a wrong and very misleading one.
{9}
We must reach the broader view which thinks of East Europe
not as undeveloped West, but as diverse.

In our changeful continent we may thus follow out one of the
most varied and perilous of the stories of men, a story of
hardly-won triumph over serious obstacles, triumph maintained for
a while in the face of serious threats that never ceased.  It is
a story that leads us to the appreciation of Europe's precarious
position of industrial and administrative leadership, with its
implications of conflict and unsettlement that make our Chinese
friends think of us as the White Peril.

We may study our physical racial origins and see how every
modern European people has come to be composed of moderately
diverse elements, probably attaining some of their present
characteristics during the marked changes of climate and opportunity
accompanying the retreat of the glaciers at the close of the great
Ice Age of Europe, and developing them further with changes
of location and opportunity in subsequent times.  We may see,
as it were afar off, facts that will be clearer to the scientific men
of fifty years hence, facts of the Mendelian inheritance of physical
characters, leading, on the one hand, to the maintenance of types
very little changed even through thousands of years, and on the
other to the combination of diverse heritages from many sources,
making an individual in many cases a mosaic of characteristics
from different ancestral types.

We may study the languages and religions of European peoples
and see that in the days before writing and markets became
features of local life, languages changed, albeit slowly, spreading
in waves of civilization, with only a subordinate relation to the
waves of racial type.  And if languages spread in waves of
civilization, this has been the case still more in matters of religion,
though folk tradition has a remarkable power of resurgence that
leads to the local adaptation of religious movements time after
time.

{10}

We may finally study economic activities and follow their
influence in waves, the power and direction of which are affected
by racial facts because temperament is no doubt related to physical
type, but are more governed by language distributions because
difference of language makes such a bar to economic intercourse,
at least in early stages.  In later stages, with the utilization of
coal and steam the international web is woven more closely and
more subtly, and this has sadly aggravated the catastrophe due
to its rupture by the clumsiness of politicians in the years leading
on to 1914.

And all through the process of evolution of races, of language
and religion and of industry, we may follow the social life of the
European peoples and the development of its organization and
its expression in response to those processes of evolution.  We
must see at the same time how it both affects and reflects
alterations which are always occurring in the European environment
through changes of climate, rising and sinking of the land, clearing
of forests and draining of swamps by mankind, development of
communications, and other results of the labour of man.




{11}

1

'_Races_'

Human diversities are deep enough to make the idea of
'European Man' a mere abstraction; we need to think rather
of 'European Men' and to study with that broad fact always
in mind, realizing that Russians and ourselves are not to be thought
of as at different steps on the same ladder, and that the unity
which has undoubtedly been trying to grow up in Europe must
be a unity-in-diversity with an accompanying growth of education
in toleration and breadth of appreciation.

As physical racial facts may be claimed to be to a large extent
very old, it will be well to begin our survey with them, but for
our present purposes it is permissible to neglect the scattered
facts thus far ascertained about the European men of the days
before the close of the last major phase (Würmian phase) of the
Ice Age.  From the period of climatic improvement (Aurignacian)
next succeeding, we have several human skeletons that demonstrate
the presence already at that early time of diverse physical types.
One type, known from two skeletons at Grimaldi (lower
Aurignacian), as well as from later remains, shows features in the
mouth and nose as well as in the very long and high skull which
relate it to types that have become specialized as Negroids of
various kinds in Africa, but need not have had marked negroid
characters in the first instance.  Another type also possessed of
a very long and high-ridged skull is known from several skeletons
(Brunn, Brux, Combe Capelle, &c.), of which that from Brunn
is the best known.  There can be little doubt that this type
with its strong brows, deep-set low eyes, cheek-bones projecting
at the sides, broad nose, projecting upper jaw and dark colouring
{12}
is an element in the modern population of remote spots in several
parts of the maritime fringe of Europe to-day, and was an important
element (whatever its colouring then) among the people of the
'Kurgan' burials so numerous along the borders of the South
Russian steppe.  Nor can we any longer doubt that this type,
modified in the course of time, has been an important element
in the evolution of modern European breeds.  A third type
remains mysterious; it is that represented by the skeleton of an
old man at Cro-Magnon with tall stature and a fairly long head,
which, however, was not very high or ridged.  The nose was
narrower, but the eyes were low and the jaws and cheek-bones very
strong.  The matter has been confused by the frequent application
of the term 'Cro-Magnon Type' to all the above indiscriminately,
mainly on the ground of long-headedness, and this
makes it difficult at times to ascertain what writers really mean
when they speak of survivals of the Cro-Magnon type in modern
populations.  There is, however, no doubt from Collignon's
careful descriptions that both the Cro-Magnon and the Combe
Capelle types survive in the Dordogne district of Central France,
and it seems likely that the former as well as the latter also
survives at least in the north of the Iberian peninsula.

However this may be, it seems clear that the peoples of
Europe in the Aurignacian and the next following ages (Solutrean
and Magdalenian) were long-headed, with varied accompanying
characters which may still be seen nowadays.  Those were ages
of intermittent retreat of the Ice Sheets which had for ages
previously made Europe so inhospitable to mankind, but at the
end of the Magdalenian Age the snow line definitively crept up
the mountain sides to something like its present level, and the
mountain regions were made available for a beginning of human
occupation.  The coming of broad-headed men, probably from
Asia Minor, then less divided from Europe, is characteristic of
this period of change, and the mountain axis of Europe has ever
{13}
since been a region of broad-headed men, separating provinces of
long-headed men to the north around the Baltic and (for a time) in
Russia, and to the south around the western Mediterranean, then
becoming increasingly cut off from tropical Africa by the
supervention of desert conditions, in place of grassland, in what we
now call the Sahara.

The long-headed men around the Baltic and in early prehistoric
Russia became, in course of time, what is called the Nordic
race, and those around the western Mediterranean, with allied
elements in the Aegean Isles, the Mediterranean race.  In both
cases they include survivors of the Combe Capelle type, and in
the latter at least some of the Grimaldi type as well, and they are
both still long-headed, though in both there has been a general,
if slight, rounding of the head, so that it is less long and narrow
than it was in early times.  In the cool and cloudy north, with
long continuance of the open-air life, sex maturity has come late,
growth has been long continued, muscularity and the accompanying
roughness of bone have been maintained and even developed,
the nose has grown long and narrow, and with it the face has
lengthened, the colouring has become fair.  In the sunny south
the settled life is of old standing, and sex maturity comes early.
Growth is not so long continued, muscularity is less developed,
and the tendency is towards smoothness of bone, the nose and
face are moderate, the colouring is rather dark.

The provinces of Nordic and Mediterranean races are widely
separated by the mountain zone in Central Europe, but in the
west they grade into one another, and here the old long-headed
type has become neither purely Nordic nor purely Mediterranean.
Especially in Britain, of old a refuge of the past off the shores of
Europe, Aurignacian types have persisted markedly, and this is
still more noteworthy in Ireland.  The mass of the population of
our islands is long-headed and intermediate in character between
the two differentiated races, tall, gaunt, and dark in parts of
{14}
the Scottish Highlands and North Wales, short and almost
Mediterranean in parts of South Wales and Ireland, and 'betwixt
and between' almost everywhere.  Probably almost every hundred,
not to say every parish, of the British Isles has examples of these
Intermediate Types, as well, of course, as of Nordics due to
immigrations from Scandinavia and the Baltic.

The broad-heads of the mountain axis of Central Europe are
technically called the Alpine race.  They are distinguished by
a thick-set appearance, rather straight brown or chestnut hair,
grey to brown eyes, often a dry whitish skin, a short face, a moderate
nose, sometimes pointing out rather markedly.  In the Illyrian
Alps and parts of the Carpathians, and stretching from the latter,
on the south side of the Pripet Marshes away into Muscovy, this
stock is often tall and dark.  In the Swiss and French Alps it is
rather short and stocky.  In the Balkan Peninsula it is often
characterized by a flattening of the back of the very high and
short head; in the west the tendency is rather towards general
rounding of the head.

It is interesting to notice from the above that the main
facts of distribution of race type in Europe probably date from the
beginning of the Neolithic Age, the period of ultimate recession
of the great Ice Sheets.  In the subsequent ages there has probably
been modification of the race types to some extent, but the main
facts of distribution of human stocks in Europe became settled in
that early time.

Some of the modifications of this scheme must be noticed briefly.

The old long-headed stocks of the Steppe border in South Russia
probably still form elements of the mixed Cossack populations, but
the spreads of broad-heads both from the Carpathian forelands
and from the Asiatic steppe have altered the average type a good
deal.  Asiatic broad-heads with the big cheek-bones and Tungus
(often called Mongol) eyes have also long occupied the Arctic
border of Russia, as Lapps, Samoyedes, &c., and, mixed with
{15}
Nordics, they form the Finn populations.  Their features have
at times been said to be distinguishable right down the east side
of the Baltic into East Prussia in individuals here and there;
one certainly finds them now and again in Gothlanders and even
in Swedes.  The net result is that the long-headed type is not
a dominant element in Russia, save perhaps in parts of the one
time Baltic provinces, that is in the new Baltic States.

The line along which the hill masses of Central Europe grade
down into the European plain that stretches from Ypres to the
Urals is marked out in many ways in European life.  Not far
from it is the main line of European coalfields, a most momentous
factor for modern times.  It is a line of exchange towns of ancient
renown.  Near it is a belt of loess, that is of loose wind-blown
material laid there in the interglacial phases of the Ice Age, so
fine grained that it does not encourage and has never encouraged
tree growth, though it is valuable for cultivation.  The loess belt,
because of its freedom from forest, was naturally of importance
as a line of movement of early man as well as a line of early
settlement, and it lay between the province of the long-heads (Nordics)
and that of the broad-heads (Alpines).  All along here are found
and have long been found breeds originating from intimate
inter-mixture of Nordic and Alpine stocks.

The general fact seems to be that the head form is derived from
the Alpine, and so is broad, but the colouring is more usually
inherited from the other side, and so is generally fair.  There are
many varieties with distinctive facial and other features, but the
broad fact is that the southern zone of the European plain, where
the two stocks have had much fractionated contact (contacts of
small groups) in little clearings of the forests that grew in Neolithic
times, is a region of Alpine-Nordic stocks which have spread to
Britain and through the Danube gaps towards the Balkans as well
as in many other directions.

The amount of intermixture and intermediacy on the south
{16}
side of the mountain axis is less marked, for here there were not
the same occasions for mingling of small groups.  The
broad-headed stocks have, however, spread downhill, and occupy a
great deal of North Italy.  They are of less consequence in the
Iberian Peninsula; the Balkan Peninsula is and probably has been
their home from early times.  A broad-headed stock with markedly
dark colouring and frequently massive build is found on coastal
patches here and there along the Mediterranean shores and on
the coasts of Western Europe.  It occurs as an important
percentage in many coastal communities, and is almost certainly
composed of survivors of prospectors and traders of the dawn of
the Bronze Age and some later periods.

These few references must suffice to illustrate the kind of
modification which the early and fundamental racial distribution
has undergone; it may be condensed into the statement that
broad-headedness has on the whole spread downhill, and has
increasingly limited long-headedness to the fringes of Europe.
It has done this not so much by sheer replacement of population
as through its biological advantage of dominance over long-headedness
in many cases of mixture.  There has, however, been a definite
spread of people of broad-headed type into the Russian plain,
as well as many movements of peoples, to some of which we get
references in the early chapters of written history.




2

_Language Families--Introductory_

The languages of the European peoples are to a large extent
grouped into Celtic, Romance, Teutonic, and Slavonic families,
all of which have sufficiently similar features to be classed together
with Sanskrit as Indo-European or, to use a much-disputed term,
Aryan.  Asiatic immigrants into Europe both in Arctic regions
{17}
and on the steppes of South Russia have brought in Asiatic
languages which have managed to persist as far west as Lapland,
Finland, Esthonia, and Hungary, but they are not sufficient to
affect the general statement.

The prior home of the Indo-European languages has been
discussed almost _ad nauseam_, and it is still so unsettled a question
as to make it unprofitable to discuss afresh whether that home
was on the Asiatic steppe, in the mountain and plateau country
from Asia Minor to the Hindu Kush, on the grassland borders of
South Russia, or somewhere near the Baltic.

It would at any rate seem that these languages did not originate
in the Mediterranean, and that the languages of that region in
pre-classical times were of other affinities.  Minoan, Etruscan, &c.,
are still undeciphered.  If then the classical languages came into
that region from outside, the probabilities are that they came in
from the north, where are found related languages which have
certainly not come from the Mediterranean.

The only language which is of older date in Western Europe
than those of the Indo-European family is Basque, still spoken in
and near the western Pyrenees.  It is a mistake, however, to speak
of a Basque race, for the physical types to north and south of the
Pyrenees are predominantly broader and longer headed respectively.
Educated people in Basque country speak either French or
Spanish in addition to the mother tongue, and the Basque language
has thus taken up many words from its neighbours; it has very
little literature and has contributed extremely little, so far as is
known, to French and Spanish.  Its affinities are quite unknown,
though a kinship with the Bronze Age languages of the Mediterranean
is suspected, and suggestions of relations to languages of
North Africa have been made.

Of the Indo-European languages it seems to be generally agreed
that Lithuanian is the most primitive surviving in Europe, and
may be the most primitive of all.

{18}

This might be held to imply that Lithuania is near the ancient
home of these languages, but it is more probable that old forms
survive here because it is a forest country shut off from the great
highways of human movement by the immense Pripet swamps
to the south of it.  It is as likely a place for a 'refuge of the past'
as any spot in Europe.  Lettish is related to Lithuanian, but the
Letts have long been active and commercial, and their language
has shed archaisms and borrowed a good deal from Slavonic
tongues.  Prussian is now quite extinct.  Meillet describes this
little group as Baltic; and it is related to the Slavonic family.
Other writers give the stricter name of Lettic.  The Albanian
dialects in the Illyrian Alps are another ancient survival with
unknown but doubtless Indo-European affinities, and also a
considerable Romance element.

Albanian and Letto-Lithuanian apart, the four great families
of Indo-European language, Classical and Romance, Celtic,
Teutonic, and Slavonic, must have become distinct before the
days of the Roman Empire, and must already at that time have
developed diverse forms in their various areas.  The Classical
languages seem to have reached Greece and Italy from the north;
how and when we shall not attempt to speculate.  The Celtic
languages now spoken by the varied and mixed racial stocks on
the westernmost fringe of France, Britain, and Ireland, include
two groups, one of which, in its use of the _q_ sound and in other
features, is held to be fairly close to the root language of Latin,
while the other often uses _p_ instead of _q_.

The q-Celtic languages spoken in parts of Ireland, Isle of Man,
and the Highlands of Scotland are usually supposed by archaeologists
to have spread westward from Central Europe with the
men of the leaf-shaped (bronze) sword about 1000 B.C.  The
view of Zimmer and Kuno Meyer that the q languages reached
Ireland via France without touching Britain is now held to
be less probable.  The p-Celtic languages are almost universally
{19}
associated with the invaders of Britain in the pre-Roman Iron
Age (the La Tene period).  That these men occupied south-east
Britain to a considerable extent there can be no doubt, and it is
highly probable that their physical type is far more characteristic
of the English plain to-day than of any part of Wales, save probably
the Severn valley.  Yet it is Wales that talks the p-Celtic language,
which may have reached it in Roman times, while the Severn valley
and the English plain have taken to English speech.  Thus we see
how inadvisable it is to speak of language-groups as race-groups.

The Baltic or Lettic and the Celtic languages are in essentials
survivals of antiquity, of great interest and value as preserving
elements which would otherwise have been lost by process of
time, but of uncertain future, for no man can say to what extent
they are likely to be spoken a few centuries hence.  It is otherwise
with the Romance, Teutonic, and Slavonic families of languages;
they are the definite possessions of the peoples of various regions
for centuries to come, and it will be well for us to try to realize how
this has come to pass.

Whatever their origins, the Classical tongues spread
southward into the Mediterranean.  Greek was propagated far and
wide by trade and by the movements of which Alexander's march
to India was a sign as well as a factor.  Rome gathered up into
itself the general heritage of antiquity for better and for worse,
and associated it with the Latin language, which became a lingua
franca in some sort within the bounds of the Roman dominion,
so that it influenced deeply not only the language of Gaul but also
that of Britain (the p-Celtic language).  The power of Latin
was so great that only insensibly did the more modern languages,
Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Provençal, and French,
arise out of it, leaving ancient forms like Walloon, Romansch,
Ladin, and Frioul in remoter spots.  Their rise was an event of
the Middle Ages, though the habit of using Latin for scholarly
purposes persisted far longer.  In earlier times languages evidently
{20}
were more fluid.  Walloon is practically French with Latin and
Celtic elements rather stronger than they are in Parisian, and we
have little doubt of the Latinization and subsequent Gallicization
of a previously Celtic-speaking people.  But since the Middle
Ages language frontiers have hardly moved.

This fixation of language has several factors.

In the first place, while villagers beginning to conquer a forest
may be feeble and isolated, and liable to rapid change of domination
and of culture relations, the process of closer settlement
brings them into relation with one another, at any rate over
small areas, and gives language a much greater hold on a larger
number of people.

In the second place, closer settlement generally implies the
evolution of markets, substituted in some cases for the seasonal
fairs that were sufficient in times of smaller needs and sparser
population.  And the market with its settled population of
tradesfolk and lawyers makes a language centre.  With this goes also
some development of communications, or at least of their use,
and the possibility of the rise of language beyond mere localism.
The crusaders, pilgrims, students, and minstrels of the Middle
Ages need to be in the student's mind in this connexion.

In the third place, the development of the art of writing and
its increased use are great factors of language fixation, and
associated with this is the development of a settled legal system.

We should have these points in mind in trying to understand
the evolution of the modern distribution of the languages belonging
to the three great families, an evolution which has occurred
to a large extent since the fall of the Roman Empire.




{21}

3

_The Peoples of Romance Speech_

Rome may be said to have gathered up the heritages of antiquity
and to have passed them on to that part of Europe which the
Empire administered, profoundly influencing for a time at least
the intimate life, and therefore the language, of the people in all
parts in which it found people not as yet accustomed to writing.

In the Aegean, Greek was old established, and intercourse had
developed a unified language out of the variants and dialects of
earlier times; hence Latin did not impose itself, and a modified
Greek has persisted down to modern times, with the serious limitation
that the written language is very different from the conversational
one, and that therefore the vitality of literature is much
reduced, and the life of the people held back thereby.

It has often been noticed that whereas Latin spread far and
wide from Rome to Portugal, the Rhine and Rumania, Greek
did not spread, or at least did not maintain the majority of its
temporary spreads, from the Aegean.

The reasons for this are doubtless numerous, but among them
one may note that the spread from the Aegean could hardly be
into regions just being opened up for agricultural settlement, and
that the Latin spread was associated with the spread of a great
scheme of communications and of legal organization.  Again, one
should realize the localism which was so deep-seated in Greek
feeling, and contrast it with the famous idea of 'Civis Romanus'.
In accord with this we naturally find that the Eastern Church
translated the sacred books into the Slav languages, whereas the
Western Church has insisted on Latin in a way that has been full
of the most momentous consequences for modern Europe.  We
must also remember the progressive hemming in of the Greek
region by Islam at the time when languages were growing out of
{22}
Latin in the west, so that the Greek base had nothing like the
expansive power of the Latin one.

Facts of physical geography had a good deal to do with the rise
of the Romance languages from Latin.  The Empire reached to
the Danube and Rhine and over the English plain.  It had some
hold over Wales, and for a time over South Scotland, but none
over the regions where Celtic has persisted in Gaelic form.  It is
abundantly proved that the hold of Rome over Britain was less
close than that over Gaul, where much Romanization of the
leader classes occurred, and the Romanized urban life was fixed
for all later time in the south.  Fragments of evidence from
Silchester and elsewhere go to show that Latin was widely used in
urban life, and so its vocabulary penetrated the language of the
pagani or peasantry, and Welsh to this day retains many traces
of this contact with Latin.  But a country with marked contrast
of speech between peasant and citizen is linguistically weak, and
the Anglo-Saxons were thus helped to spread their language
when they arrived after the Romans lost their grip and many
Romano-British leaders had emigrated to Brittany.  Romance
languages do not now reach the banks of the Rhine anywhere,
though they approach them fairly closely at the gate of Belfort,
that approach to the Rhine where southern influences would
spread most powerfully.  Wallony, as a dissected plateau, rather
remote and backward until the coal period, has retained its
Romance speech, and has increasingly assimilated it to modern
French.  Lorraine, separated from the Rhine basin by the forested
heights of Hunsrück and Hardt, has also remained stubbornly
French, but German has spread up the Rhine tributaries through
North Switzerland, up the Ill basin, which is now Alsace, up the
Moselle gorge between Hunsrück and Eifel, so that Trier (Augusta
Trevirorum, Treves) is now German, up the tributaries of the
lower Moselle, so that the peasantry of Luxembourg, the people
of the Eifel and of the Saar basin, are largely or even mainly
{23}
German speaking, and along the lowland to Flanders, which
maintains Low German dialects, collectively called Flemish.  The
Flemish plain and the Walloon plateau were long separated by
the forests of Hainaut and Brabant, but the clearing of those
forests in the Middle Ages, mainly by people spreading down
from the plateau, extended the area of Gallic speech and reduced
the chances of development of a real linguistic unity in the
Flemish fringe.  Flanders in consequence suffers from disparity
of dialects, and French has been widely used as a language of
civilization.  With the rise of the nationalist sentiment (see p. 98)
in modern times, a severe reaction against the dominance of
French has set in, and now threatens the very existence of the
Belgian kingdom.  A part of the département du Nord, in France,
speaks Flemish, but French has long been gaining ground slightly
on Flemish in France and probably in Belgium too, in spite of
a modern spread of Flemish workpeople into the French
speaking area.

East of Switzerland the great Alpine barrier between the Roman
bank of the Danube and the real Latin areas brought it to
pass that the pagani near the Danube were not fully Romanized,
and made the whole region fall linguistically to the invading
languages, German and Magyar, but a small island of Ladin,
a collective name for several ancient dialects, still persists around
Cortina and in the upper Grodenthal.  The allied Frioul (with
more Italian admixture) is spoken in eastern Venetia, and
Romansch, also related, in the south of Grisons, East Switzerland.
The main boundary between Romance and Germanic is, as usual,
not along a main watershed.  The watershed, which is pierced by
the Brenner Pass, has German spoken on both sides, and the
agency town on its south side (Bozen) is still German in language,
though strategic considerations have made the victors move the
new bounds of Italy right up to the Brenner.

A curious result of language changes is observable in Rumania.
{24}
The Roman frontier province of Dacia was strongly occupied for
a time (A.D. 107-255), and the Low-Latin element must have had
a marked cultural superiority over the indigenous migratory
shepherds.  They imposed their language, and the Transylvanian
mountains have assisted its survival ever since, but it has survived
only thanks to large borrowings which have made its vocabulary
three-fifths Slav.  In spite of military pressure from time to time,
the people of this hill knot have followed the usual rule for people
so situated, and have spread downhill, giving an area of modified
Romance language from the Dniester almost to the Tisa (Theiss)
and from Bukovina to the Balkan Danube.  This area was,
however, seriously isolated from the other Romance regions after
A.D. 270, and it naturally received Christianity from Constantinople,
so that it has come to be distinct (p. 79) religiously from
the other areas of Romance speech, which are the stronghold of
the Roman Catholic Church.

The large Slav element in Rumanian well illustrates the general
principle that vocabulary is more easily changed than syntax,
a principle one may follow along the Flemish border, where
Flemish idiom is maintained with French words, or along the
Welsh border, where the form of sentence is so often Welsh
though the words be English.

Speaking generally we see that there has been on the whole
a certain recession of Latin from the old boundaries of the Roman
Empire, but that, this apart, that Empire exercised a most potent
influence on the speech of its European citizens.  The recession
was due to mass invasions which, however, as a general rule,
penetrated much farther into the Roman domain than one would
judge from linguistic evidence alone; in other words, the Latin
influence has surged up again, and indeed in one sense those
repeated resurgences of Latin feeling have been a main feature
of European life in the last twelve or fourteen centuries, while
the swaying of the power of Latin and non-Latin elements has
{25}
been one of the chief causes of war and disunion on the Continent.
We may now glance at a few aspects of this swaying of boundaries
which are germane to the object of this little book.

The Roman Empire in Gaul seems to have been divisible into
belts, the southern of which, with its dry and sunny summer,
became deeply Romanized in city and country, language and
tradition, a zone in which the cities were the residences of all
who had sufficient wealth.  The middle one, in the main the
Paris basin, had fewer cities, but the country was Romanized in
language at least.  The northern one near the Rhine had
strong Roman cities, especially frontier-towns along the river,
but the country does not seem to have been Romanized at all
deeply.

The Franks seem to have been bodies of adventurers seeking
new homes, the surplus population of Teutonic regions in what
is now north-western Germany.  They were not trained to city
life, and though the strong frontier-cities survived their passage,
the cities of the Paris basin seem to have weakened under their
onset, albeit the invaders were not able to break the continuity
of civic life in the south.  The Paris basin thus became provided
with a rural Frankish landed aristocracy around which later on
there developed the localism which is called the feudal system.
As is the way of aristocracies the rude Franks adopted and modified
the Romanized language of the Gauls, making the _langue d'oïl_
the mother of modern French.  In the south, older forms persisted
less altered as the dialects of the _langue d'oc_.

Though in more modern times French has more or less
triumphed in the south, two variants of the old languages persist
and have acquired some literary strength; they are Provençal, in
use in Provence, east of the lower Rhone, and Catalan, in use in
Catalonia, and to some extent in Roussillon, modified by contact
with Spanish.  Needless to say the _patois_ of the peasantry of
southern France retains many traces of the _langue d'oc_, and the
{26}
boundary between the _langue d'oc_ and _langue d'oïl_ has been traced
by French scholars.  A study of that boundary shows that the
_langue d'oïl_ penetrated through the gate of Poitou between the
Central Plateau and the barren lands of La Gatine, and established
its hold in the basin of the Charente, and almost as far as
the gates of Bordeaux.  Farther east the lower slopes of the
Central Plateau form its effective boundary; the export of men
and women downhill from the plateau being apparently sufficient
to restrain the general tendency to uphill spread of the language
of the plain.  In the Rhone valley the boundary of the _langue d'oc_
bends southwards, so that Lyons belongs to the _langue d'oïl_, and
the whole Isère region is intermediate between north and south.
The boundary near the Rhone is at the narrowing of the river
valley near Valence.  The narrow, formerly forested, section of
the Rhone valley between Valence and Donzère has been a barrier
in several ways; Mr. Peake has shown that it divided a Burgundian
from a southern culture in the earlier phases of the Bronze Age.
It was a factor in the southern boundary of the Burgundian
kingdom of Theodoric's time (_c._ A.D. 520), in the boundaries
of the Comté de Provence and the Comté du Valentinois, and so
on.  Donzère is approximately the northern limit of the olive,
and the Isère basin has forests that are distinctly non-Mediterranean
on its great slopes.  As one journeys from the Isère region
to that of Drôme and Durance one finds the aspect of the country
changing from that of the forest of summer green to that of
bare rock masses and a marked tendency to summer brown.

[Illustration: Central France]

That this boundary is not an isolated phenomenon is well seen
by comparing it with the boundary between the France which
reintroduced the Roman law (_Droit Écrit_) early in the Middle
Ages and the France which preferred to go on judging by customary
law (_Droit Coutumier_).  This boundary and that of language
intertwine, but the influence of big cities as legal centres accounts
for some differences.  The legal boundary naturally keeps some
{28}
distance north of the linguistic one near the great southern city
of Bordeaux.  On the other hand, the influence of valley cities
like Clermont-Ferrand helped the northern law to penetrate up
the slopes of the Central Plateau, so that the legal boundary is
here the more southerly.  Lyons, a southern city in so many
ways, pushed the legal boundary far to the north of the linguistic
one in the Rhone-Saone basin.  The boundary line of old-time
(pre-1789) Customs Dues, the boundaries of the various Salt
Dues (_Gabelles_), of the Governments in existence in 1789, of
the general prevalence of the Gothic style in architecture, of
the general prevalence of (north) steep-roofed and (south)
flat-roofed houses respectively and so on, are all related to the above
lines, and can be followed in some detail to work out interesting
divergences.  The net result of a study of these lines is to show
that the French people, apart from the German borderland,
consist of two cultural elements, a southern with Roman survivals
in cities, language, &c., and a more northern one which is much
less Roman.  Between them is an intermediate area with mixed
allegiance.  The study of such a set of boundaries can be given
a special value, for it shows us that the linear boundary, however
necessary it may be under our outworn system of aggressive states
in politics, is an artificiality when applied to the study of peoples.
Boundaries are zones, not lines, zones of intermediacy which
with better political organization might become interpreters
rather than causes of conflict as they have been in the past.

In order to understand the German borderlands better it would
be well to use similar methods in studying them, though here
we have difficulties due to political prejudice.  We have seen
that in the Paris basin the rural Franks adopted in modified form
the Romanized language of the Gauls, and with this came in the
influence of the Roman Church, the heir of the imperial tradition,
not only here, but also along the old frontier of the Rhine-Danube.
Under this influence civic life grew afresh, and the towns of the
{29}
Paris basin with their market-places dominated by the cathedral
are a most notable feature.  As these towns grew, the enlargement
of the churches under the influence of the great wave of mediaeval
enthusiasm led to the adoption of what is called the Ogival or
Gothic style of building, in the Ile-de-France, and soon in the
Paris basin generally, as a substitute for a Romanesque style
which had been tending to change under pressure of Eastern
(Byzantine-Lombardic) influences.  With the details of
architecture we are not primarily concerned, but the spread of the
Gothic over the Paris basin, its failure to oust the Romanesque
in the south, its penetration along the Route de S. Jacques
(Pilgrim Road to Compostella) to Bordeaux, Bayonne, Burgos,
and Léon, its later spread through the Flemish lowland and also
across the hills to Metz, Strasbourg, and Basle, are a useful indication
of the spread of Gallic feeling.  In the Rhine region it spread
with difficulty, and the Romanesque is highly characteristic here;
beyond the Rhine it spread only with much modification.

The contrasts between the boundary of the fully French Gothic
and the intertwined boundary of French speech, over against
German, are like the contrasts above noted between south and
north in France, and one might further study the growth of
the historic kingdom of France, the lines of Customs Dues,
Gabelles, and so on, as well as facts about the occurrence and
relative importance of Protestantism in various parts.  All would
show that between the Paris basin and the Rhine is a zone of
people with mixed allegiances, and that, however convenient
language may be as a distinctive mark, it by no means gives
a full idea of the complexity of the case.

Flanders is Low German in speech, but profoundly affected by
France in many ways, as its architecture suggests; its zealous
Catholicism is a marked feature.  Wallony is Celto-Romano-Gallic
in foundation, marvellously altered by modern industrialism.
Luxembourg is indefinitely debatable, Lorraine mainly French,
{30}
Alsace Alemannic (Old High German) in speech, but in other
respects deeply affected by France.

The study of the zone behind the old Roman frontier of the
Danube could be worked out on somewhat similar lines, but with
less profit, owing to complications connected with the spread of
Asiatic peoples and armies in subsequent times.

The rise of the various peoples of Romance speech behind the
ancient frontier is again best studied without too much
concentration on the modern states, though language and state do
correlate fairly closely.

In the Iberian peninsula, Basque spoken on either side of the
western end of the Pyrenees, but over a larger area on their
southern side, gives its name to a people physically not very
different from their Spanish neighbours, save that probably there
are among them more survivors of ancient (Aurignacian) types,
especially, it is said, of the Cro-Magnon, than among the majority
of the Spaniards.  Economically they have a certain amount of
distinctness as mountain dwellers on the one hand, and as sailors
on the other.  Historically, too, they have a certain distinctness;
their connexion with the Carthaginians and the Romans, with
the kingdom of the Wisigoths and later with the Arab Emirates,
was much less close and continuous than that of regions immediately
to the south.  The people of the little Pyrenean republic
of Andorra speak not Basque but Catalan, and are one of a number
of instances (San Marino, the four original cantons of Switzerland,
Lichtenstein, Montenegro) of the apartness of little mountain
groups; there was a number of such groups a few centuries
ago.

The main part of the peninsula uses languages that have arisen
from Latin, one on the west coast which is known in the two
forms of Portuguese and Galician, one along the northern portion
of the east coast which is called Catalan, and is more nearly
related to the _langue d'oc_ than to Spanish, which is the language
{31}
of the great plateau of the peninsula, and has become also the
language of Andalusia and of the non-Catalan east coast.

In the early part of the eighth century, Islam, at first
represented by Berbers and later by Saracens, occupied roughly what
had once been Carthaginian Spain, only temporarily holding the
north-western quadrant which became a centre of Christian
resistance; it had previously remained, for a time at least, apart
from the Wisigothic kingdom.  The hold of Islam on the east
coast north of Tarragona was also only temporary, but as a result
of this the Barcelona region during the formative period of
language was more in touch with South France than with the
north-western and Christian part of Spain, whence its language
came to have the kinship with the _langue d'oc_ already noted.  In
the centuries of Iberian weakness in face of Islam the west coastal
plain diverged in speech from the upper Douro basin.  As Islam
weakened in Spain the west coast language spread southward,
while the plateau language (Spanish) spread south especially
via Toledo, the Guadiana region being largely waste land for the
time.  As Spanish, the language of the defenders of Christianity,
became the replacer of Islamic languages, it, rather than Catalan,
spread over the parts of the east coast south of the Ebro as they
were recovered for Christianity.  When the north-west was the
basis of resistance to Islam, the age-long sanctity of Compostella
came into prominence, and the great shrine of St. James (Santiago
da Compostella) became world famous, and later on, a centre of
pilgrimages.  Thus in spite of the kinship of Galician with
Portuguese, Galicia became part of the kingdom of Spain, though its
seafarers had much in common with the coast-dwellers of northern
Portugal.  One should note also that, whereas in Portugal the
coastal plain has the severe barrier of the plateau edge to divide
it from Spain, in Galicia the lines of hill spurs grade down to the
sunken coast-line without any marked change.

Though Berber and Saracen elements have been suppressed,
{32}
a good deal remains to attest their influence not only in cities
and their buildings but in the cultivation of the south, and
especially in the irrigated gardens (_buertas_) of the east coast
and in many features of the people's life, even in some details of
dialect.  Arabic is now studied a good deal as a 'classical' language
in these regions.

There are sharp contrasts in physical geography between the
indented coast of Galicia, the narrow coastal strip of North Spain,
the plateau-basin of the historic Léon and Castile, the lower
lying dry eastern basin of Aragon, the Catalonian coastal plain
with hills between it and Aragon, the barren plateau of New
Castile, the southern trough of Andalusia, the east coastal regions
of Murcia and Valencia.  These contrasts have hindered the growth
of intercommunication and of unity, and it is said that recently
there were one thousand villages in Spain still lacking effective
connexions with the road system.  The distinctness of the people
of the different regions is therefore a marked feature so far as
custom and social inheritance is concerned, and the commercial
Catalans have often thought of separating themselves from the
old-fashioned agriculturists of Spain.  The long duration of the
struggle with Islam kept the Spaniards a people of leaders and
common soldiers with, for a time, a Jewish middle class
(Sephardim).  But religious zeal led to expulsion of the Sephardim,
though not a little of their blood remains, and they have taken
a good deal of Spanish blood with them to their later homes in
Salonika and elsewhere.  Spain's development of a middle class
thus lagged far behind that development among the other west
European peoples in the Middle Ages, and the weakness of that
class has been a factor of Spain's difficulties ever since, of her
troubles in America, of her political weakness at home, of the
subjection of her mining wealth to English exploiters, and of
her long-continued financial troubles.  The railway has improved
matters to some extent by promoting communication, but such
{33}
was the fear of France that the Spanish gauge is different from
that of the rest of western Europe.  The stoppage of the blood-drain
of soldiers and governors formerly sent to maintain her old
empire seems to have helped Spain greatly, and the importance
of her products in the recent war made her prosper, and her
peseta went up far above its old par value, which was 25-22½ pesetas
= £1 expressed in English terms.  Since the war, difficulties in
Morocco, internal strains, resumption of imports, and payments
for transport services have sent the peseta down again.  It is now
28.50 = £1, but that is still nearly twice the value of its former
French, three and a half times the value of its former Greek, and
more than three times the value of its former Italian equivalent.
The general spread of irritability and of the war spirit, however,
seems to have increased the political difficulties between Spaniards
and Catalans, as it has those between English and Irish, in both
cases partly because the Continent has, elsewhere, so largely been
settled on the principle of nationality based upon language, or
tradition, or both.

The Portuguese of the north are rather distinct from those of
the south, in part because among the latter there is a good deal
of African blood derived from intermixture with slaves from the
seventeenth century, an intermixture which does not appear to
have had good effects.  The steep edge of the Spanish plateau
behind the Portuguese coastal plain, so sharp that its river-breaches
are mostly deep and narrow, helps to keep Portuguese and Spanish
distinct.

The old-fashioned agricultural life of the people, based upon
corn and sheep in Castile and Aragon, and vines, oranges, and
olives in Andalusia and in suitable parts of both east and west
coasts; the paucity of harbours, save in Galicia; the ecclesiastical
zeal derived from the long fight with Islam and the struggle
with the schismatic Low Countries, have all helped the lack of
communications to keep Spain old fashioned.  The
{34}
Counter-Reformation, arising out of the struggle with the Protestants of
the Low Countries, has been anti-national everywhere, and has
contributed its part in hindering the growth of modern nationalism
in Spain.  Further, owing to her weak middle-class life and her
lack of coal, Spain has not utilized even the opportunities she had
of industrial development, so she stands apart, in this way as well,
from the life of modern Europe.  Perhaps the modern development
of hydro-electric power may alter this to some extent, and
in any case the non-industrialization of the country in the coal
age may prove an advantage to the country in the end.  Memories
of old unhappy far-off things are too apt to make Englishmen
emphasize the religious persecutions by Catholics in Spain,
forgetting too easily the religious and political persecutions
barely extinct in the British Isles.  We should remember, on
the other side, the traditions of Salamanca University with its
blending of Christian and Arab thought at the northern outlet
of a mountain pass from Arab Spain, the glories of Santiago, and
the part its pilgrimages played in the development of European
literature, the galaxy of great names, among which Lull, Cervantes,
Vives, and Velasquez are but the best known of many, and last,
but not least, the influence of the early phases of Saracen
civilization in the south on the then semi-barbaric peoples of Western
Europe.  We should also remember that Spanish remains one of
the great world languages, current not only in the mother country,
but also in the greater part of Latin America, with a fine tradition
in literature and oratory, as well as in other forms of art.  It is
interesting that under the newly revised scheme (1921) Spain
is added to the four nations (Britain, France, Italy, and Japan)
which provide permanent members of the Council of the League
of Nations.

South of the great curve of the western Alps the varying
dialects have ultimately fused into the beautiful Italian language,
the most direct descendant of Latin.  Since Roman times there
{35}
have been notable intrusions from without, such as that of the
Longobards or Lombards into the Po basin in the sixth century,
and those of Islam and of the Normans into the south, but the
Latin element has assimilated all these, though in the Alps
themselves the tendency is towards French on the west and German
on the north, with the curious survival of Romansch and Ladin,
already noted in the north-east.  A small area of Italian speech
near the coast (Mentone) has been included in France.  In
Calabria there are a few small Greek patches, and there are
Albanian ones in various parts, while Slavonic (Slovene) is spoken
in various parts of eastern Venetia and Istria.

The home tradition of Rome was that of the city-state, and
it resurged during the period of mediaeval trade and operated
against the growth of national consciousness.  The influence of
the other city-states, notably Venice, operated in the same way
in the Middle Ages.  This was further held back by the struggles
of Germanic peoples to gain Rome and revive the Imperial
tradition, and still more by the influence of the Church,
particularly since the advent of the Counter-Reformation and the
Jesuit power.  But the railway made the old localism impossible,
and the widespread nationalist movement of the nineteenth
century had its effect in Italy as well as elsewhere.  The struggle
for the unification of Italy and the redemption of Italian lands
from foreign dominion by Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi is one
of the romances of humanity, and from it has arisen the modern
Italian kingdom (1870 onwards) with its promise of magnificent
development.

The difficulties in the way include three large ones.  Industrial
power was lacking until hydro-electric schemes became practicable;
they are remedying the position to some extent in the north,
and the cleanliness of these schemes encourages high-grade
industries.  The deep social and even racial contrasts between
the Po basin and the south of the peninsula are another difficulty.
{36}
A third is that of the large and often neglected estates (_latifundia_)
of the south.  There neglected drainage has allowed accumulation
of stagnant water, and the swamps are infested with malaria,
which not only kills many children, but also weakens those who
survive its pernicious attentions.

The Italians are among the best engineers of the world, and
are minded to remove this difficulty by drainage works, as well
as by social reorganization now proceeding actively and
contributing an element of unrest that makes Italy's recovery from
war sacrifices a complex problem.  It is, however, a problem that
cannot but be solved, and with the redevelopment of Mediterranean
trade following the opening of the Suez Canal and the
retreat of the Turk from non-Turkish lands, the future of the
centrally placed kingdom of Italy should be a bright one.

Hydro-electric schemes during the past twenty years have
drawn North Italy (Milan) and Switzerland, and to some extent
South Germany, together, and Milan has grown in wealth and
importance as one of the first-rank cities of Europe with her
high-grade industries in the city, thanks to the transmissibility of
power by cable.  The city's long and powerful artistic tradition
is an important factor of her industrial future.  Of late these
tendencies have been encouraged by the policy of the Western
Powers, for it now pays Italy to import from Germany rather
than from England, and this redevelopment of mid-European
economic relations will help to rehabilitate the value of Italian
money if internal social politics permit.

The fame of Italian workmen for road and bridge building as
well as for cultivation is world wide, and they have spread in
considerable numbers both to other European countries and to
America.  In every case, however, they have found the lands
of immigration developed already beyond possibilities of language
change, and so the Italian emigrant tends, in the long run, to
change his heritage; but in the meantime he sends surplus earnings
{37}
back home, and these remittances and the money brought in by
emigrants returning are an important resource for Italy.  It is
interesting to contrast French and Italians in this respect; the
Frenchman emigrates with the greatest reluctance, but has
planted his language very firmly in such places as the St. Lawrence
estuary and Mauritius, though political organization there has
passed out of his hands.  Those emigrations were made when the
lands in question were not yet occupied at all by Europeans, and
therein lies the difference.  The French, Spanish, and Italian
peoples of late years have been working to revive the idea of the
Mediterranean as a Roman, or rather now a Romance, lake, and
have spread their influence along the North African coast, Spain
on the Moroccan coast.  France into Morocco and Algeria, both
France and Italy into Tunisia, and Italy into Tripoli and the
Cyrenaica.  These are fields of linguistic and cultural as well as
administrative expansion, as the French and Italians, at least,
appear likely to organize closer settlement and an economic life
very different from that which they found.

The French-speaking and Italian-speaking parts of Switzerland
can best be treated with Switzerland as a whole, and of the other
outlying Romance groups only a few words need be said.  In
the Channel Isles, the pre-Norman basis was Celtic-speaking,
and there are abundant indications of links with Brittany.  Norsemen
came in and Norse place-names are well in evidence, but the
islands under this influence became merely an outlying fragment
of Normandy, and Norman French became the language.  The
islands, in spite of very close settlement, have doggedly retained
distinctive dialectical peculiarities.  There are many other
examples of this non-fusion in islands such as Ireland, Crete,
Ceylon, and Java.

Guernsey has at least three varieties, for example.  The importance
of the roadstead of St. Peter Port in Guernsey for British
commerce with Bordeaux in the Middle Ages was a powerful
{38}
factor in the dissociation of the Channel Isles from Normandy
and their retention by the kings of England, and their strong
anti-French prejudices were long a feature.  The growth of
commerce with England and the fact that the local dialects have
no literature make the islands one of the comparatively rare cases
of modern language change long after the organization of close
settlement.  Of the islands of the western Mediterranean it may
be said that in the Balearics a variant of Catalan is spoken, while
the other islands, including Corsica, use Italian dialects, save
that the Alghero district in Sardinia uses the same dialect as the
Balearic Islands.




4

_The Peoples of German Speech_

Without attempting to estimate what was the speech of the
early long-headed types of man on the European plain (the
almost level belt from Calais via Vilna to the Urals), and without
trying to dig back deeply into prehistoric time, it may be stated
that in the early days of history the home of the Teutonic family
of languages seems to have been on the western portion of the
European plain and in the related parts of Scandinavia, no doubt
with various Baltic extensions.  Of its attempts to spread towards
the Paris basin then, as in later times, there is little doubt, but
its ultimate extension in this direction has already been discussed.
It is most probable that the people who used these languages
were mainly Nordic coast-dwellers and occupiers of the wet
marsh and moorland country on the west side of the Elbe.  In
many parts their physique must have been Alpine-Nordic to
a large extent.

The area of Teutonic speech historically falls into three: the
Scandinavian area including Jutland north of Flensburg, the
Low German plains from the Elbe to the mouths of Rhine and
{39}
Maas, and the Highlands east of the Rhine, into which Teutonic
speech spread, and in which it became enriched by mixture with
Celtic, and, later on, with Latin and Romance elements, and so
became Alemannic, and, ultimately, High German.

In Roman times Teutonic speech was thus most characteristic
of the belt outside the Rhine frontier of the Roman Empire,
and from this basis we may trace the Teutonic peoples onwards.
The forests of Germany were dense and extensive, and apparently
in post-Roman times they were being attacked in two ways: the
hill people were moving down and making the population more
Alpine in physical type and more Alemannic in language, and the
Church was founding abbeys and spreading its influence across
the Rhine from the erstwhile Roman frontier-cities then becoming
cities of the Roman Church in most cases.  The wave of Roman
civilization interrupted by the barbarian movements was thus
resumed under Church leadership, and with it went the growth
of towns and of intercourse, after some time making the contrast
between south and north in Germany not only a contrast between
hills and plains and between High German and Low German,
but also a contrast between a much more Romanized and civic
south and a much less Romanized and more rural north, though
the Church did establish itself in the north in due course.

Alemannic became characteristic of the hill belt next beyond
the region of French speech, and there replaced a Brythonic
Celtic language.  But farther east the languages of the hill people
had by this time taken Slavonic form, so that the Alemannic belt
was of but moderate width, including the Alps and their northern
flanks down to the Prussian plain, but not Bohemia and the
Carpathian arc which were of Slavonic speech (p. 61).  The
downhill movement above mentioned characterized the Slavonic hill
lands as well as the Alemannic, so that on the Prussian plain east
of the Elbe old languages (probably of Lettic kinship, see p. 18)
gave way to Slavonic, and in course of time the Elbe became the
{40}
frontier between German and Slavonic, with the Altmark (old
frontier territory) to the west of it.

The progress of Germanization eastwards to the Mittelmark,
between Elbe and Oder, and the Neu-Mark farther east, towards
but not up to the Vistula, must not be interpreted as meaning
that these regions were still purely Slavonic in the days of the
Elbe frontier.  Probably German was already in use here and
there, but Germanization and the spread of the Church involved
agricultural development and closer settlement, and so changed
the character of the country.  It was done under German leadership,
and brought in German settlers.  In the early Middle Ages
there was a recession of Slavonic on the Prussian plain, and now
only one fully Slavonic region in the German area remains.  This
is the Wendish area, and the Wends are supposed to have spread
down from the hill slopes on the northern frontier of Bohemia.
The present area of the Wends is astride the upper Spree, and
especially around Kottbus, and the district is called Lusatia, but
in the Middle Ages they spread farther north.  It is largely
Germanized in speech at the present time, but preserves old
features and Slav names.  Slav place-names are as characteristic
on the German plain east of the Elbe as are Celtic names in the
non-Celtic speaking part of Scotland, and illustrate a change of
language of a people already having some settled organization.
This contrasts with the rarity of survival of Celtic town names
on the English plain.  The changes of language areas since the
Middle Ages have probably been quite small.  The zone west of
the Vistula has remained a zone of admixture of German and
Polish-speaking people, whence the 'Polish corridor to Danzig'
of the recent treaties, linguistically and traditionally justifiable
and yet admitted to be dangerous politically.

The relation of the Teutonic languages of Jutland to one
another in origin is beyond our scope, but the dialect of the
western side of the base of Jutland has remained fairly distinct
{41}
as 'Frisian', and has attempted a literary development in the
last century.  The new treaty boundary between Germany and
Denmark gives what was North Slesvig to Denmark, and is intended
to run along a line in the linguistic frontier-zone.  The Low
German speech of the Rhine mouths, with the long isolation of
the people of that region and their concentration on the work
of fighting the sea, developed into Dutch.

We thus have Dutch, Frisian, Low German, High German or
Alemannic, and naturally a Middle German developing between
the two latter along the zone where the southern hills grade into
the northern plain.

The complex topography of the south German hill country
had given rise to an infinite muddle of small states, and at the
end of the fifteenth century they agreed, as the people of South
France had done centuries before, to 'receive' the Roman Law.
This reception was effective over most of the hill country, but
not in any considerable part of the plain, a natural consequence
of the contrasts already noted, and a further accentuation of
them for the succeeding period.  In the early sixteenth century
came the religious schism, during which the northern plain and
the foothill region left the Catholic Church almost _en bloc_, while
the people of the hill and valley country of South Germany
remained attached to Rome.  This, however, by no means
adequately describes the territories of the two ecclesiastical
systems, for the Roman influence on the Rhine seems to have
kept the Ems region largely Catholic, while Protestantism occupied
the south along the Cassel-Frankfort line, and spread through
Württemberg and the Nürnberg district.  The strongly Catholic
regions are the Rhine (except about Mainz), the Ems basin, the
upper Main area, focusing on Würzburg and Bamberg, and the
upper Danube basin (the chief part of Bavaria proper).  The
Rhine and Danube, with the Roman frontier towns becoming
ecclesiastical cities, stand out remarkably in this connexion.

{42}

The contrasts between north and south have been discussed
for the Middle Ages, but they have diminished on the whole in
later times.  Germany's vernacular literature gained its great
impetus from Luther's fine translation of the Bible.  He used
a Saxon dialect of mixed High and Middle German, and, as in
other countries affected by the Great Schism, the language of the
Bible became the literary and political language to a large extent,
thanks in great part to the practice of requiring every confirmand
to learn a portion of Scripture in the vernacular, and to the
consequent spread of the reading habit and the demand for
books.  The growth of newspapers, schools, and public
discussions has spread this Middle German as the standard speech
of the whole country, but Frisian and Alemannic dialects do still
survive within the borders of the new German republic.

Intermixture between Nordic and Alpine stocks has spread the
dominant broad-headedness of the Alpine over most of what is
now Germany, but it is often combined with characters derived
from the Nordic side (fair colouring and certain facial features),
and a good deal of Nordic physique survives in the north-west
and in Württemberg, as well as on the forested Thuringian hills.
This spread of broad-headedness may be thought of alongside of
the spread of modified High German and of the spread of southern
rulers like the Hohenzollerns northwards, and it will then be seen
how, in many ways, the south has permeated the north in more
modern as well as in more remote times.  It is useful to bear
these things in mind as an offset against the danger of over-emphasizing
the effects of the spread of Prussian political organizations
over the south in the nineteenth century; it is also well to
remember how much of that organizing power is traceable
directly and indirectly to the Huguenot refugees finding homes
in the hospitable Brandenburg of the seventeenth century.

If the cathedrals are the sign and token of the people's effort
in the Paris basin, the Universities, based upon that of Paris, are
{43}
the characteristic feature of civilization in the hill region of
Germany, and, if prose is the triumphant expression of the
French genius, lyrics and music are the glory of the German.
The sharp criticism and startling clarity of French thought,
growing where all the racial stocks of Europe jostle one another
in a good wine country, stands in unceasing contrast to the more
laborious stodginess of the more or less Alpinized German with
his heavier menu in both food and drink.  The quick enterprising
Nordic element is present here and there; but it is the Alpine
patience and appetite for detail that has increasingly dominated
the psychology of the German people, working out into a power
of combination that has had remarkable results in the industrial
period.

Just as we have had occasion to trace Romanization in the
German belt, so we are able to follow Germanization in the
Slavonic belt, but this time with differences.  In the first place,
there are settlements of Germans in forest clearings, as noted
already for the plain east of the Elbe.  But for the most part the
western zone of the Slavonic belt had been Christianized, in large
measure via Bohemia, before efforts at Germanization developed
seriously, and so it was the next stage of social development that
was affected by the German spread, namely the growth of towns.
We thence find some areas of Germanized rural population, but
also, through what have become Poland and Transylvania, German
groups in the towns, and a similar movement into Russia has
been a feature of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The most important area of Germanized people in the Slavonic
belt is what is now known as East Prussia, the disconnected
province of the German Republic (1919).  This is the zone of
gradation from the broad-headed people of Central Europe to
the long-headed Baltic folk speaking old languages, of which the
now extinct Prussian was one, related to Lithuanian.  Christianity
had spread down the Vistula before the Germanizing process had
{44}
got far across the Oder, so that agricultural organization, fixing
the popular language, made the lower Vistula mainly Slavonic
on its western side.  The next stage of progress of the Roman
tradition had now to be across the Vistula into East Prussia, and
it took place at the suggestion of the ruler of Danzig and the
monks of Oliva near by.  It was carried out by the Teutonic
Knights, and involved Germanization at least of the formerly
Prussian-speaking people near the coast.  The Masurians farther
inland among their marshes were, and remained, more Slavonic,
but felt the Germanizing influence sufficiently to secede, along
with their northern Germanized neighbours, from the Roman
Church in the sixteenth century.  The result is a curious one: the
modern East Prussians are mainly Polish-speaking, but largely
Protestant, among the Masurian Lakes, and German-speaking,
and, for Germans, rather unusually long-headed on the coastal
plain.  In the recent plebiscite even the Masurian Poles showed
marked aversion to incorporation in the re-created and intensely
Roman Catholic republic of Poland, and it seems probable that,
when treaty allocations are finally made, the Masurians as well as
the coastal peoples will remain under Germany.  East Prussia
is a rural region with large estates, and this fact, added to that of
its position as a sort of German frontier outpost, has made it
intensely patriotic and very conservatively minded.  The East
Prussian population becomes mixed with people of Lithuanian
speech across the Niemen, but Memel, as a town, is naturally
largely German.  Its fate is (April 1922) not yet settled.

The other groups of German speech and associations in Eastern
Europe beyond the Vistula and Austria are in no case sufficiently
large to be described as _peoples_, though they form important
communities, and it may be useful to give a short list here.

In Hungary they occur in numbers in the Pécs district
(south-west), around Budapest, north-west of the Bakony
Wald, &c.

{45}

In Yugoslavia there are groups in the Backa, between the
lower Theiss and the Danube, and in the Banat.

The enlarged Rumania has a number of German groups in
the metalliferous district east of the Banat, between the upper
Maros and the upper Alt, especially near Sibiu (formerly Hermannstadt),
around Cluj (formerly Kolozsvar) and Bistrita (Bistritz),
in Bukovina, and also in southern Bessarabia.

Numerous groups are studded along the Bug and around the
southern side of the Pripet Marshes.  In South Russia there are
again several groups in the Odessa region and north of the Sea of
Azov.  Still larger numbers live along the Volga in the Saratov
region.  The German settlements in Transylvania, often loosely
styled Saxon, date in large part from the twelfth century, and the
people came in considerable numbers from the Rhine in its
'Low German' section; the Bukovina and Russian areas received
their German influx towards the end of the eighteenth century.




5

  _Some Peoples intermediate between Romance and
  Germanic in speech_

Having now referred to Italians, French, and Germans, it seems
appropriate to invite consideration of the Swiss people, so marked
a unit in European life in spite of differences of language, religion,
and economic activity.  A very early but apparently incomplete
development of the settled life on lake shores was correlated with
a good deal of seasonal and other migration of people using the
hill pastures in summer and developing dairying activities.  Feudal
localism came in as on the more open areas round about, but did
not take such root as it did on the richer plains, so that though,
with exceptions (p. 23), the form of speech approximated to that
{46}
of surrounding lands (Italian, French, and Alemannic), political
domination by the surrounding lands was strongly and, in the
end, successfully resisted.  The landed aristocracy in the end
either left the poor territory (parts of Neuchatel) or gave up their
privileges and merged in the people as leaders (especially in
French and German Switzerland); they had to be a _noblesse de
campagne_ rather than a _noblesse de cour_, and the fate of the former,
even in France, but much more in Norway and in Finland, has
been to merge itself in the people.  There has been a persistence
of localism without the accompaniment of feudalism, and the
cantons have democratized their government to a remarkable
degree, developing pacific ideals combined with zeal for local
defence.  They now furnish a most interesting example of a strong
union for defensive purposes with little possibility of the passing
of defence into aggression.  Centuries of poverty have led to
emigration and to a keenness on intellectual equipment paralleled
in Scotland, Denmark, and modern Wales, but reaching a unique
level in Switzerland with its seven institutions of university rank
and their relatively enormous student population.  The value
of the Swiss Universities has brought them students from all
over the world, and the hospitality of Switzerland to refugees and
to tourists has made the country a most important international
centre, as the Red Cross and the League of Nations head-quarters
testify.  Side by side with this has grown the importance of
Switzerland as a banking centre, this line of work being much
promoted by the growing tension in economic relations in Europe,
due to the huge development of militarist aggression since 1895.
Another aspect of this development of banking has been that
connected with the industrial transformation of several parts of
Switzerland through application of hydro-electric power, a process
which has brought Switzerland into closer relation with South
Germany and North Italy, and has made her external commerce
an important matter.  It need hardly be said that Switzerland's
{47}
hospitality to refugees has brought her craftsmen, thinkers, and
artists for centuries, and has thus enormously enriched her life.
The debts of Holland and of the British Isles to refugees from
the intellectual elite of other lands may be compared with that
of Switzerland.  In Britain the families at the centre of the
commercial and intellectual life of our cities are often closely
bound up with groups of refugees, as their association with
Unitarian Churches and the Society of Friends often shows.

Another region which may appropriately be treated after
consideration of the Romance and the German Teutonic peoples is
the British Isles.  Reference has already been made to the British
and Irish peoples in the chapter on races (p. 11) and the section
on the Celtic languages (p. 18).  It was there suggested that these
islands were a remote fringing region in ancient times, and as
such retain old types of long-headed men, with comparatively
little alteration, such as the types of Combe Capelle man of
Aurignacian times, the related river-bed types, and the long-barrow
types of later, but probably still pre-Bronze Age, times.

At the dawn of the Bronze Age came others, mainly
broad-headed types, among whom we can distinguish the brawny,
rough-browed 'Beaker-making' people found in the round
barrows and surviving, much refined in some cases, in the modern
population, the strongly built and sometimes tall, dark broad-heads
still found on patches along our western coasts and around
the coasts of Ireland, and provisionally identified with the
prospectors for tin and copper who spread from the eastern
Mediterranean in the third and perhaps the second millennium before
Christ, the broad-heads of the short cist graves of our east coasts
especially from the Humber to Caithness, the tall longer-headed
people of the Iron Age (La Tene) movements, and the descendants
of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Vikings, all more or less
tall and fair, and for the most part long-headed.  The Norman
Conquest seems to have brought in broad-heads from across the
{48}
Channel, as one judges from contents of mediaeval ossuaries,
which sometimes contrast strikingly with the modern populations
of their districts.  It seems likely that the growth of modern
industrialism has led to a resurgence of the older and dark
long-headed types, which seem able to withstand the evil conditions
of the slums to some extent, while the tall, fair long-heads and
the descendants of the beaker-makers seem inclined to drift off,
unless circumstances allow them to rise to a position of leadership
and comfort.

The study of language shows how completely Teutonic speech
replaced Celtic, even as regards names of settlements, on the
English plain, though eager etymology may have exaggerated
this completeness and may have unduly emphasized the change
of population supposed to be involved.  The fractionation of old
elements among the Welsh hills has permitted the old language
to survive, though it is now spoken not so much by the physical
heirs of the people who brought it to Britain as by the older
stocks to whom they taught it.  The openness and good centres
of the Central Lowland of Scotland were unfavourable to the
survival of Celtic, which it was so hard to mingle with Teutonic
speech, but this compact region, well marked off from the English
plain by the southern uplands, the Cheviots, and the moorlands
of north England, kept a sufficient organization (largely of the
Celtic Church) through the post-Roman centuries to hand on
many of the old place-names and to develop an organized national
consciousness at the earliest opportunity.  Wales, lacking an
administrative centre, has lost its law but kept its language.
Scotland, with the great centres of its Central Lowland, has
developed its own law, but its old languages are almost gone.

History follows out for us the growth of national consciousness
on the English plain in Plantagenet times right up to its
organization under the Tudors and its great outburst under Elizabeth,
when the common revolt of the English plain and central Scotland
{49}
against Rome drew the two historic units towards one another,
helped by community of language and by the weakening of old
ties between Lowland Scotland and Catholic Bourbon France.
The rise of industrialism may be said to have consummated the
union, albeit with an attendant loss of valuable elements of the
population in the events following eighteenth-century highland
rebellions and nineteenth-century evictions for the creation of
deer forests.  The remnants of old-time people and ways in the
western Highlands and the Hebrides are nevertheless interesting
and important from several points of view; they preserve valuable
elements of traditional civilization, and possibly even distinctive
spiritual faculties, which our industrial civilization seems to kill,
or at any rate to damp down.

Ireland, it will be seen, was not led to co-operation with England
in at all the same ways, and it also illustrates the diversity
which is so apt to persist in off-shore islands, largely because of
the diverse outlooks of their different shores (compare Ceylon,
Java, Crete, &c.).  In the case of Ireland the poverty of its centre
has played a great part in maintaining disunion.  But neither
was it led to revolt against Rome along with England and Scotland,
nor was it transformed as they were by industrialism, save in its
north-east corner.  So, _mutatis mutandis_, the small, if interesting
survivals of old tradition and feeling noticed in the western
Highlands are the characteristic of large areas of Ireland, and its
Catholicism has been ever deeper rooted in the people's minds
by the bitterly cruel persecutions maintained by England.  The
net result has thus been, as in Czechoslovakia, a tendency to
redevelop separate and antagonistic national consciousness, and
to make it likely that association rather than subordination is the
line of solution of this difficult problem.  The openness of Ireland
to the sea and her many connexions with the Continent seem
to have been, along with repressive politics, causes of loss of native
language which, in any case, would have been difficult to adjust
{50}
to modern needs, so that Ireland is a case of nationality in which
the language basis is not a real vital fact, however much enthusiasts
may try to insist on it.  But apart from this the cases of Ireland
and Czechoslovakia are remarkably analogous; the latter is as
much within striking distance of the German centres as Ireland
is within striking distance of us, they both have an industrial
element which finds it difficult to co-operate with the agricultural
majority and claims separate treatment, both look back to
centuries of unhappy memories of undoubted wrongs, and both
have strong claims on the thoughts of those who desire peace.

The Scottish people have found a _modus vivendi_, and with the
recent growth of toleration a _modus vivendi_ has almost been
attained for the Welsh people, but in any case the matter of Wales
is different from that of Ireland; the language difference in
Wales does not cut so deep as the religious difference in Ireland,
and the industrialized population is a majority in Wales, but
a minority in Ireland.  The gradation of Welsh into English on
the Welsh side of the border is another important factor in the
case of Wales, and that country is becomingly increasingly able
to develop the spiritual heritage of her rural areas in pacific
fashion.  With moderation on the part of England there seems
hope that Great Britain may thus be able to maintain and develop
a scheme of unity-in-diversity, and recent developments hold
out hopes for Ireland too.

Man with its Gaelic and Norse elements, the Hebrides with
their immemorial survivals, Orkney and Shetland with their
Norse background, are all of great interest to the ethnologist,
and contribute interesting diversities to the enrichment of British
civilization, but hardly constitute serious problems.




{51}

6

_Peoples of Low German and Scandinavian Speech_

We now come to the Low German and Scandinavian peoples.

The Dutch include the fair-haired Nordic and Nordic Alpine
people of what may be called the mainland, and the dark broad-heads
of the islands of the Rhine mouth.  Whether these latter
are Alpine peoples or maritime settlers of prehistoric time one
does not know, but their strong seafaring interests, on the whole,
support the latter hypothesis, in spite of the power of
environment.  The common effort and common sacrifices to fight the
sea have been a cement for the people of Holland, and, beyond
the Rhine, they were comparatively little influenced by Rome.
Their absorption in the struggle with the sea and their apartness
from Romance Europe of the Middle Ages have had results in
their provision of refuge for Jews and heretics, in their secession
from Rome during the religious schism, and in their increasing
separateness from their Flemish linguistic cousins on the Roman
side of the fateful river.  The thoughtfulness encouraged by
old-established, if incomplete, toleration has made Holland
contribute to thought in a way quite disproportionate to her size;
and her sea-beggars, becoming in time sailors of the world's seas,
inherited the East Indies from the Portuguese, and inaugurated
what, under the English name of New York, has become the
biggest port of the world.  If vulnerability to organized militarism
beyond her borders and England's advantages of position for
maritime primacy have led Holland, especially with the growth
of British industrialism, to fall somewhat to the rear commercially,
her people, nevertheless, remain a most important element both
in the life of Europe and in the commercial relations of the world.
Her language has developed a literary standard to which have
been approximated the Flemish dialects of a people struggling
{52}
for recognition, but unlikely to seek union with Holland because
of religious divergence.  This nevertheless increases the strength
of the Dutch tradition, while the growth of German industry
has meant almost as much for both Rotterdam and Amsterdam
as it has for Antwerp.  Further, the provisioning of the big
centres of industry has given Holland new commercial opportunities,
and she is thus in a position to play her part in relation
to her big German and English neighbours, while nevertheless
maintaining her own individuality, and, indeed, making that
individuality rather a difficulty in connexion with the complex
international problem of Antwerp and the Scheldt.  That problem,
being one of economics rather than of peoples, need not be
discussed here beyond an indication of the extremely international
development of that premier outlet for the European plain prior
to 1914.

Standardized German has not ousted old forms of speech in
the rural parts of the north-west German coasts, and there has
been a tendency to give Frisian literary expression in the nineteenth
century, but this movement, like that in favour of Provençal,
has not gone far enough to have economic influence or to bear
much upon politics.  On the whole, with the growth of systems
of education, Frisian has receded, and is now chiefly spoken on
the west coast of Holstein and of the part of Slesvig which, by
plebiscite, has recently decided to remain German.

Denmark at the Baltic entry, and linked to the life of that sea
especially by its islands and the important passage of the Sound,
makes with Norway and Sweden the Scandinavian sub-group in
the Teutonic family of languages, and here nations and languages
correspond reasonably closely.

Whereas Holstein, at the base of the peninsula of Jutland,
became included in the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages,
Slesvig remained outside that attempted organization.  German
speech and thought pervaded South Slesvig as far north as the
{53}
fjord which has Flensburg at its head, but in spite of political
effort, 1864-1914, North Slesvig remained steadily Danish in
feeling, and has now been liberated to rejoin the little kingdom.
The boundary chosen seems to show a fair-minded interpretation
of the recent plebiscite, though there are minorities on both sides
of the line.

Denmark has a very long story from the days of her prehistoric
kitchen-middens onwards, and she owes something to the fact
that Jutland was in some sort a north-western terminus of a belt
of loess, heath, and sand-hill, stretching westward from the steppe
border of South Russia.  Along this belt came to her the
pre-Bronze Age immigrants distinguished by their 'Beaker pottery',
and the amber trade seems to have used a part of this route.

The Danes have thus long been a racial complex, but the fair
Nordic type predominates on the whole.  Denmark's share,
especially in the organizing aspects of the great maritime
movements of post-Roman times, is well known, but Petersson's view
that this occurred during a period of favourable climate and
ice-free coasts in the northern seas helps one to realize the connexion
of that activity with a particular period.  The association of
Denmark and Norway in maritime activity was long continued,
and when the latter fell on bad times in the Middle Ages, the
domination of the former became very marked.  The political
aspect of the matter is outside our scope, but with the nineteenth
century the weakening of Denmark under German pressure
loosed the bonds, and circumstances gave Norway in the end
a remarkable opportunity.  It thus came about that in 1864
Denmark saw the end of her _ancien régime_, and began a new career.
The name of her Bishop Grundtvig stands out in company with
that of Abbé of Jena and a few others in the drab century of
commercial imperialisms.  He set out to re-educate the Danish
people in co-operation and simplicity, and, with his high schools
for the development not so much of the technicalities as of the
{54}
amenities of life, he became one of those who builded better than
he knew.  The sheer financial success of the new agriculture of
Denmark, thanks to skilled co-operative organization, is an
outstanding phenomenon, however much may be due to the general
increase of prosperity of the stock-raiser in the regions round the
manufacturing centres.  Copenhagen has become a centre for
the wholesale marketing of butter, with train ferries and other
communications making links with Esbjerg, with Germany, with
Sweden, and across to the east side of the Baltic.  Like Switzerland
and Holland, Denmark contributes in no small measure to the
intellectual life of Europe, partly through the opportunities her
sons find in Berlin and other large centres of the big nations.

Of the first peopling of Norway comparatively little is known,
but the population must have been sparse indeed until man was
fairly well equipped to cope with that region's serious difficulties.
It is a country of ledges along a broken coast, fantastically cut
by fjords which are deep valleys of the edge of a high plateau
modified by ice and then partially submerged under the sea.
The partial submergence has converted outlying hillocks into
a maze of islands, between which and the land there is, for long
distances, a fairly open channel, an old longitudinal valley no
doubt.  The men of the fjords are in large measure of the tall,
fair, long-headed Nordic type, but around the seaward ends of
the southern fjords are dark broad-heads, who in this case are
almost beyond doubt settlers from the sea.  The physical geography
of Trondhjem Fjord, on land and water, helps to make clear its
special early importance, particularly during a period of good
climate, but the whole of Norway suffered sadly in the fourteenth
century from bad harvests and Hanseatic interference, and from that
time onwards to the nineteenth century Norway's fortunes were low.

As in other lands of ancient poverty (note Finland and Switzerland)
the nineteenth century brought the final merging of the
old aristocracy in the people; the relation with Denmark was
{55}
loosed and a temporary link with Sweden, partly under fear of
Russian Tsarist aggression, did not take deep root in the lives of
the people.  Much importance must be attached to the linguistic
and literary revival of which the famous Bjornsen is the central
figure.  Meanwhile British Free Trade, and especially the repeal
of the British Navigation Acts (1849), gave the Norse sailor and
shipbuilder a chance, and the country developed a great mercantile
marine, which managed to maintain itself until 1914, in spite of
the advent of the iron ship and steamer.  During and since the
war Norway has not managed to keep pace with other mercantile
marines like those of the United States of America and Japan.

Internally, Norway was from far-off times till quite recently
a people of fisher-farmers prizing individual property on the small
cultivable ledges beside the fjords, and leading cattle to summer
pastures on the high grasslands of the great mountain plateau.
The practice of inheritance by the first-born son is traditionally
associated with these little farms so difficult to subdivide, and the
long-continued absences of much of the male part of the population
(fishing) are another feature.  The latter fact is said to be
accountable for the unique power of women in Norwegian affairs,
and the women have certainly contributed much to the modern
development of Norway as a pacific, self-reliant democracy.  In
the twentieth century there has already been a great growth
of industry based on the hydro-electric power available in such
quantity in the fjords; the chemical industry, including the
preparation of nitrates from atmospheric nitrogen, is a feature.
Since the war the value of Norwegian currency has gone down
with the slackness of shipping and the inability of Germany to
trade as she used to do, but the depreciation is not very great,
and may well right itself if the war-clouds clear.  Fish and timber
have long been, and are likely to remain, valuable commercial
assets; the need of imported cereals is a permanent difficulty.

At the back of Norway, on the high mountain plateau, are the
{56}
Lapps, whose seasonal wanderings disregard the international
frontier between Norway and Sweden.  Fortunately, therefore,
when Sweden and Norway gave up (in 1905) their artificial and
temporary union, it was mutually agreed, as became enlightened
peoples, that the frontier would be entirely demilitarized.  The
separation coincided with a great development of Norway's trade,
based upon the application of hydro-electric power to industry.

The Norwegian people centuries ago seemed to be giving up
their language for Danish, but here, as in so many other countries
(Bohemia, Serbia, Finland, Flanders, Catalonia, and Wales), the
nineteenth century brought a resurgence of local speech, and the
work of Bjornsen and Ibsen gave that speech a literary standard,
and made its literature a power in the modern world, fortunately
with comparatively little development of international antagonism,
for by this time there was no language competing locally with
Norwegian; Danish had retired and Swedish was too far off to
matter seriously, though its pressure was at one time threatened.

The Western Scandinavians of late Viking times spread across
the northern seas to Iceland, Greenland, and 'Wineland', which
has been identified with the New England coast of North America.
The connexion with America was lost, and that with Greenland
almost, if not quite, lost as well, probably in the severities of
climate of the fourteenth century, but that with the Faroes and
Iceland persisted.  In this way Iceland has become in some sort
a repository of the Scandinavian past, and thence has spread in
modern times a knowledge and appreciation of the ancient sagas
of the Norse rovers, with elements embedded in them that date
back far beyond Viking times.  Icelandic and the literature
embodied in it have thus become an important matter for students
of European tradition and literary history, and the influence
thence exerted on modern Germany, notably through Wagner,
has been far-reaching and many-sided.

Sweden's associations are necessarily very different from those
{57}
of Norway.  It is true that the high plateau is fairly sharply
marked off from the rest of Sweden, but the steps down are less
precipitous than on the Norwegian side, and though Sweden has
a Lapp-world as her mystery soil for folk-tale, yet contacts between
Swede and Lapp and Finn do take place and influence type.
The recent beautiful atlas of photographs of Swedish types
illustrates this for that country, but shows that the most
characteristic element, as in Norway, is the tall, fair Nordic type.

It is apparently chiefly since the recovery of the north from the
severities of the fourteenth-century climate that Sweden as a unit
people has shown the most marked activity.  A factor in this was
undoubtedly the weakening effect of the great religious schism in
Germany with the opportunities this gave to the France of the
Counter-Reformation and the Bourbons.

Sweden even went through a phase of control of nearly the
whole of the Baltic (_c._ 1660), but this could not be maintained,
though the southern peninsula of Scania has never returned to
its old associations, which date back to prehistoric times, with
Denmark.  The rise of Russia brought about the withdrawal
of the Swedish influence from the east side of the Baltic, but the
Finlanders of the south-west include several Swedish-speaking
groups, and 96 per cent. in Aland use that language.  The episode
of military glory contributed to the maintenance of a local
aristocracy, which has made Sweden very distinct, socially, from
Norway, though democratization has gone a long way even here,
and no new titles of nobility are created.  Her more extensive
lowlands, with possibilities of wheat in the southern half, make
farming a richer matter than it can be in either Norway or
Finland, while timber and good iron ore open up industrial and
commercial possibilities, to which the zone of lakes and its canal
system contribute not a little in the way of transport facilities.
Sweden is thus a relatively rich Baltic land, though many features
are shared in common with the peoples of the other (Finnish,
{58}
Lettish, and German) Baltic coasts, and her natural associations
with Baltic Germany should be understood and appreciated.
Sweden has come through the war with her money at a general
European premium, a distinction she shares with Holland and
Switzerland alone among all the peoples of Europe.




7

  _The Peoples on the Eastern Border of
  Europe-of-the-Sea_

We have now surveyed the linguistic groups of Romance, Celtic,
and Teutonic speech, and may note that among those of Celtic
speech we find the most marked survivals of antiquity in social
features.  Among the Romance- and Teutonic-speaking peoples we find
that there has long been a tendency towards closer accord between
linguistic and political groupings, and that now, with some exceptions
it is true, the political units are also linguistic ones.  The
regions of Romance and Teutonic speech are the great regions of
organization of the State; they have a stable scheme of administration
and revenue, a settled legal order, an approach to representative
government based upon a franchise; in short, they are
the regions of the patriotic nation-state.  The exceptions have
been noted here and there in the above sketch.  Alsace is
Alemannic in speech but French in attachment in many respects.
Switzerland is a unique combination of units belonging to three
language groups.  Flanders, or the area of Flemish speech, is
partly in France and partly in Belgium.  Flanders and Alsace are
two of the most serious of European problems, and even if they
be mitigated by political foresight, the dangers from them are
not likely to diminish definitively unless the 'nation-state' can
be made to occupy less of the political horizon.

When we turn our attention eastwards from the lands of
{59}
Romance and Teutonic to those of Slavonic and Baltic languages,
we find that, until recently at all events, there was no accord
between the political and the linguistic units, and that, even now,
the accord is fragmentary enough.  We find also that in place of
the principle of 'one region, one language', which applies broadly
in the west, there is nearly always a minority language alongside
the majority one.  The 1914-18 crisis has shown how very unstable
were the political units of the last fifty years, and the
'nation-state', that is a settled administration worthy of the name of
'state' combined with a social unit based upon tradition, has
only just begun its career in Eastern Europe.  Furthermore, in
this eastern part of Europe we find languages of non-European
character in Finland, Esthonia, Hungary, and Turkey, and to
some extent in Bulgaria.  This is then the zone of Euro-Asiatic
contacts and interpenetrations, and these contacts have determined
a great deal of the characteristics of the social order in
this part of the Continent.

While the above statement is broadly true, it must, nevertheless,
be stated that history records considerable and persistent, if
partially unsuccessful, efforts to develop the nation-state in those
western Slavonic lands which felt the influence of Rome either
through the Empire or through the Church, while the contagion
of nineteenth-century nationalism has spread far and wide.

During the period of close settlement and fixation of language
and of growth of administration in the west there were periods
of pressure Europewards from Asia, illustrated by the coming
of Szeklers and Magyars, and the formation of the Magyar kingdom
of Hungary, by the advance of the Bulgars, since practically
Slavonized, by the pressure of the Mongols on Russia, and by the
spread of the Turks.  The spread of Finn or Finno-Ugrian peoples
westward along the north is probably older, and has been more
gradual and less organized.

Apart from this northern Finn-route and subordinate
{60}
Finn-ways (Perm, Kazan, Samara) to the Volga, the westward roads
have been along the loess, either that of the Polish platform or
that of Wallachia and the Hungarian plain, and the defence of
the west against pressure along these ways gathered chiefly around
Vienna and around Poland (Cracow in earlier times and Warsaw
later on).  Austria, as we now know it, was once the Ostmark,
the eastern march or frontier domain of the German-speaking
peoples, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire which has just
collapsed after a long process of decay was the fruition of the
organization that defended Western Europe from Asiatic pressure
on the south-east.  It was obviously not a nation-state, for besides
its German and Magyar elements it included under its control
the many Slavonic and partially Slavonic people of the hill frame
around the middle Danube.  Its day of greatness coincided with
the holding up and the beginning of retreat of the Turkish
pressure; its subsequent history is one of clever diplomacy aiming
at maintaining a power created for a purpose that was now no
more.  The improbability of any renewal of effective pressure
from Asia on the now so highly armed west of Europe did away
with the _raison d'être_ of Vienna as a city of camp and court, and
it will require a higher development of European unity to make
Vienna take its definitive place as the nerve centre of the
Continent's land-communications.  For the present, therefore, the
size and magnificence of Vienna seem to lack justification, and
there is manifest distress.  A far smaller city would do admirably
for the capital of the small area henceforward to be called Austria,
and the past traditions of Vienna expressed in palaces and luxuries
are hardly what would naturally grow up around a modern railway
centre.  When, however, we realize the need for increased
unity of Europe we cannot but feel how valuable the University
Museums and Libraries of Vienna might be were they internationally
developed so as to give Europe a natural culture-centre
second only to Paris.  The suggestion to make Vienna the
{61}
capital of the League of Nations revealed an over-emphasis on the
military and diplomatic tradition of Vienna, an aspect of that
city's life which it might be perilous to redevelop.

But as we are concerned with the peoples of Europe rather than
with the states, this slight mention of Vienna must suffice, and
we may proceed to deal with the linguistic groups of Europe east
of the Teutonic and Romance areas in the way in which we have
touched upon those of the west.

The Baltic or Letto-Lithuanian languages have already been
mentioned, and little more need be said save that they have long felt
the double pressure of Teutonic and Slavonic influences and have
absorbed words from both.  Apart from them, the languages spoken
are largely of the Slavonic family, and it is frequently said that
the Slavonic languages are less distinct from one another than are
the languages of the Romance and the Teutonic families.  They
have been less influenced by written forms than have the latter;
oral tradition has counted for more, and differences have
consequently not become so fixed as farther west.  There is a certain
amount of dispute as to the primary home of Slavonic speech,
but it seems increasingly likely that it arose as an adaptation of
older forms of Indo-European languages by the people of the
Carpathian arc and the Polish platform on its north-eastern
flank, and that it spread thence especially in the post-Roman
centuries.  Schlüter has found reason to believe in a considerable
movement from the hills to the valleys and plains in those centuries,
and with this we may connect progress of forest clearings and
spread of Slav languages, especially towards Muscovy.  Most of
the regions of Slav speech came into touch with Christianity first
of all through Constantinople, but in the case of the more westerly
ones the influence of the Roman Church outweighed that of its
eastern sister before many centuries had passed, and the Roman
principles spread eastward as far as the bounds of what has been
called above 'Europe-of-the-Sea'.




{62}

8

  _The Slav-speaking Peoples and the Borders
  of the East_

Of the western Slavonic-speaking peoples the Czechs, inhabiting
the hill-girt country of Bohemia, are among the most important.
They were first Christianized by the Eastern Church, but became
Roman Catholic, the early religious centre being at Taus
(Domazlice), at the Bohemian exit of a pass from Bavaria.  Later on,
Prague was founded and became the capital, and it should be
noticed that in it, as in many other cities of Slavonic language,
the cathedral is within the castle, typifying association between
religious and political leadership, both being frequently more
western (German) than the rest of the population.  It was natural
both that the small, compact, and distinct mass of Czechs should
early attain a sort of national self-consciousness, and that their
country, in spite of its physical separateness, should receive German
immigrants, especially up the Elbe gap.  The distinctive personality
of Bohemia is illustrated by the fact that the University
of Prague, founded on the Paris model, was the first University
established beyond the Rhine; it is illustrated also by the fact
that Bohemia at so early a date, under John Huss (_c._ A.D. 1398),
revolted against Papal abuses, and would undoubtedly have become
schismatic had military force not been exerted strongly from
without.  Nevertheless Bohemia has not been able to maintain
political independence in the past.  After a short period of power
it subsided under Hapsburg influence as Vienna began to gather
Europe around her to defend Christianity.  And later on (1620)
the Czechs were subjugated, and the Counter-Reformation and
the Jesuits with their universalist and anti-nationalist ideas
repressed the Slavonic tradition until it broke loose once more
in the revival of Romantic literature and Nationalist feeling
{63}
which was such a feature of the nineteenth century.  In that
century the rise of industry brought many more Germans into
North and North-west Bohemia, making that region a sort of
'Ulster', distinct in feeling from the rest of Bohemia, which is
far more agricultural.  But the rise of Czech feeling spread
afresh the use of that language in spite of two centuries of
severe repression, and Prague had to develop Czech and German
Universities side by side.  The relation of Bohemia to Vienna
politically was also reflected financially; Vienna was until 1918
to a large extent the money centre for Bohemia, while that country
supplied the rest of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with a large
proportion of its needs in manufactured goods.  As a result of
the defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary, Bohemia has risen
to power again, and has many advantages for the immediate
future in spite of dire need of fertilizers, machinery, and credit.
Her new government is promising well, and stands out in favourable
contrast to those of some of the other countries which have
risen suddenly after the war.  Its problems will be that of
arranging for German co-operation and that of devising substitutes for
the old financial links with Vienna.

Between Bohemia and the Carpathians, or more strictly the
Tatra, is a physiographical trough such as so often occurs between
fold-mountains (e.g. Tatra) and old blocks (e.g. Bohemia).  It
is occupied by the March (or Morava) river, is called Moravia,
and is known as the Moravian gate, for through it Vienna
communicates north-eastward not only with the Oder basin via
Breslau, but also with the Vistula basin via Cracow.  Somewhat
more German than Bohemia the Moravian gate is still mainly
Slavonic, with dialects grading eastwards towards Polish.  There
has been some difficulty in settling the limits of Moravia and
Poland, the former having properly been allocated to the Czech,
or better, Czechoslovak, state in the recent treaties.  The dispute
centred chiefly upon Děčin
(formerly called Teschen), and was
{64}
solved by the cession to Czechoslovakia of the greater part of
the coalfield and the railway which lies in Czechoslovakia, both
before it enters and after it leaves
Děčin territory.  The town
of Děčin itself goes to Poland.
Not only does Czechoslovakia
include Moravia, but it also stretches along the south flank of
the Carpathians through a region of Slovak speech and rural
life right on to the small district where Ruthenian just emerges
west of the Carpathians.  Thanks to their different language
these Ruthenians are to have local autonomy under Czechoslovakia.

The new state is thus of considerable size, and includes several
dialects of Slav; it is both agricultural and industrial; it is
keenly patriotic, and disposed, one hears, to split off from the
Roman Church, just as it was so disposed in the Middle Ages.
This state is contrasted to some extent with the majority of the
Slavonic regions, in that, in spite of a large German element,
there is more homogeneity and strength of cultural tradition
throughout the Czech country than there is among many other
Slav-speaking peoples.

Farther east the pressure from the Asiatic grasslands and
plateaux hindered the development of social settled life in the
Middle Ages, when it was progressing farther west, and as a
consequence the population of the towns is often different in tradition
from that of the country.  In the rural districts, again, the
culture connexions of the ruling classes have often been different
from those of the simple village folk.  The result is that in many
parts there have long been three social strata, often differing in
language, religion, and political association.  Upper Silesia has,
in parts, German towns set in Polish country, and though some
of the German element is of fairly recent introduction (and
connected with industrial development), it nevertheless illustrates
the social and political problem.

In the Middle Ages the Jews previously inhabiting the Rhine
{65}
lands found it difficult to fit into western schemes, as we know
from English history, and some moved eastwards (Ashkenazim)
into the Slav lands to form an important element of the
population of the towns, especially in Poland, where their numbers
were increased by Tsarist restrictions on their settlement in
Russia itself.  Their language, Yiddish, is generally described as
a modified German dialect written in Hebrew characters and
owing some debt to Hebrew tradition in other respects.  As they
have a linguistic and religious entity of their own, and as
inter-marriage with Gentiles has been restricted, it follows that they
form a very distinct block, most difficult to work into any State
organization of a western type.  It must therefore be very open
to question whether the recent treaties endeavouring to spread
western state-theory eastwards are the best ways to provide for
the life of the people concerned.  A modern state needs towns
and industry; the Jewish element in the towns of East-Central
Europe is enormously important, and cannot be dispensed with
save at great cost, as well as with the greatest injustice, and
yet assimilation of Jew to Gentile in East-Central Europe is
almost out of the question.  The development of a nation-state is
necessarily held back when there are such diverse elements, and
League of Nations schemes for protection of minorities offer
a valuable line of progress if they can be realized.

In western Poland the peasantry are Polish for the most part,
the townsfolk are Jews and Germans with a few Poles, and the
aristocracy until 1914 was to some extent German.  Farther east
the aristocracy was Polish and largely anti-German, the peasantry
Polish, and the intermediate people still largely German and Jew.
Farther east still the middle class of the towns continued the
same general character, but while the aristocracy was Polish,
the peasantry was Lithuanian or White Russian or Ruthenian,
according to district.  One needs but to play upon the possible
combinations among these elements to realize how difficult it is
{66}
to secure unity.  It is often the natural fate of aristocracies to
fade out unless they can recruit themselves from below, and that
recruitment has usually meant the ultimate merging of the
aristocracy in the tradition of the simple folk, the classic case
being the merging of the Norman aristocracy of Britain in the
Anglo-Celtic heritage of the commoners.  But the merging of
aristocracies would not bring unity because of the burgher
element, largely German, and the labouring element, largely
Jewish.  Farther west the petit-bourgeois element of the market
towns has often mediated differences between peasant elements
of different regions, but as in Poland the former is not to any
extent Polish, it is inconceivable that it should mediate between
the Polish peasantry farther west and the Ruthenian and other
elements farther east.  In Rumania the difficulties are analogous,
and so are those of Hungary.  Parts of Yugoslavia seem fortunate
in having a simpler problem.

A mere catalogue of the peoples of East-Central Europe with
appended notes would hardly justify the space it would need in
this small book, especially as information of the kind is easily
available in standard works of reference.  It therefore seems more
useful to sketch in broad outline the physical and vegetational
facts of East-Central and Eastern Europe in order to bring out
the essentials of the setting of human life and the variation of
that setting with the region so that peoples of diverging outlook
and traditions have grown up in those regions.

The first and simplest physical fact is the immense broadening
out of the European plain, which, in the region between the Rhine
and Vistula, is practically Prussia alone, while farther east it has
added to it the ancient land-elements of the north, so that its
effective extent is from the White Sea to the Black Sea through
degrees of latitude, and consequently through marked gradations
of climate.  The climatic facts are equally well known.  The
great extent of the land surface, and still more the fact that it
{67}
is but a small extension of the far greater land surface of the
Asiatic interior, give it a condition of dense dry cold air through
the winter.

The form of the plain, with the consequent possibility of ingress
of westerly winds eastwards along the plain in summer, i.e. when
the cold anticyclone has gone, gives a wedge of summer rain,
alternating with considerable warmth, and this wedge is of the
utmost importance in human geography.  It is the area in which
the summer green and winter black and white forest can grow,
but as already stated the beech grows only in its western portion,
and stops along a line from about Danzig or Königsberg to the
east of Bukovina.

Farther east the wedge is occupied by oak and elm, but the
valuable beech is absent.  The deciduous forest region includes
South-west Finland, and its northern boundary runs eastward
from the vicinity of Petrograd past Vologda.  In many current
maps its southern boundary is made much too sharp; the
possibility of its growth depends here largely upon moisture, so it
spreads into the drier south-east along river and other lines of
relative dampness.  The country with zones of deciduous forest
interspersed with grass land is known as the 'Ukraine' or 'Border',
and on its border towards the grasslands and semi-desert we have
the Cossack country, with the Don Cossacks on the western side
of the barren patches near the lower Volga, and the Orenburg
Cossacks on their eastern side.  The Ukraine and its eastern
extensions are floored to a large extent with earth rich in organic
matter (black earth, Tchernoziom), and have possibilities of
considerable agricultural development if a settled scheme of life can
be devised.  In the south-west the language of the peasantry is
Ruthenian, farther east Russian, both variants of Slavonic speech,
but variants which seem fated to diverge from one another more
and more.  The climate of the Russian plain largely inhibits the
higher grades of intellectual activity during the seasons of severe
{68}
cold and heat, with the result that those whose circumstances
do not give them artificial protection from the weather must
depend to a large extent on routine for the continuance of social
organization.  Conditions are thus not favourable for development
of a complex unity over a wide area, and localism is therefore
the prevailing tendency, carrying with it probabilities of
maintenance and even of development of dialect-differences rather
than of linguistic unification.  These brief indications give us an
insight into some of the more serious, if less appreciated, problems
of governmental schemes in the varied vegetative regions of what
was once Russia, which yet lacks convenient orographical boundary
lines between its different parts.

Our memories from earliest years are stored largely in verbal
forms, and as a consequence the language of our early youth
has deep-seated associations, which remain as conscious or
unconscious memories, the latter if we forget our early speech
and learn a new language.  That the old language is not
completely lost seems to be proved by experiments in
hypnosis, which show that the associations of that old language
remain, and that therefore the associations with the second
language learnt tend to remain incomplete unless a very special
personal effort is made, made therefore by a supernormal mind,
to overcome this difficulty.  Common language-associations of
early childhood are thus a most important link between men,
promoting mutual understanding and easing intercourse and
mutual confidence for the subnormal and normal, rather than
supernormal, individuals who form the bulk of a population,
and this helps us to see why the linguistic unit is so important in
political matters, and unity of language is so often the basis of
the successful state, which is consequently so difficult to organize
in Eastern Europe.

These reflections apply more particularly to the region formerly
known politically as Russia, but they also apply to some extent
{69}
in South-east Europe, though the phenomena of language are there
to some extent masked by others.  The region commonly known
as the Balkan Peninsula is to a very large extent high land, with
opportunities for seasonal pasturage on the hills, and this, together
with the unsettlement due to the strikingly contrasted life of the
thin coastal fringe and to the pressures from Asia Minor and from
the North, has impeded the evolution of the settled life, the
market town, and the nation-state.

The thin coastal fringe is a zone of Mediterranean life in which,
already prior to classical times, hoe-culture and the tending of
fruit trees had become one of the mainstays of life, but commerce
was almost equally important.  It is the home of the city-state,
and in times of peace Greek became the chief language, with
Latin, and later Italian, on the Adriatic coast.  In times of
disturbance the commercial element seems to have been partly
submerged, and Slavonic or Slavonized elements have spread in,
so that in Dalmatia it is possible to debate indefinitely the affinities
of the people's social heritage, and much the same might be said
of various portions of the north coast of the Aegean.

Inland the great height implies cold winters, and these supervene
even in the lowlands when the latter are open to the north
(Vardar) or to the east (Danube).  The conditions here are thus
practically those of Central and even of East-Central Europe, and
as social evolution has been impeded we find here still a good deal
of seasonal nomadism or _transhumance_ (p. 90), a marked survival
of the large family unit holding and working lands in common
(the Serb Zadruga), and an early and still feebly organized type
of town (especially the lesser towns of Rumania).  A Jewish
element (Ashkenazim in Rumania) is valuable commercially in
most of the towns, and the vestiges of the Turk are found far
and wide.

Whereas lands which now have Romance, Celtic, or Teutonic
speech have received large elements of civilization, and therewith
{70}
of religion, from or through Rome and the western Mediterranean,
the east of Europe has been largely outside the sphere of Roman
influence, and has received contributions to its civilization and
religious organization from Constantinople, with results that are
different in many ways, though Constantinople owes a great deal
to Rome, and though both Rome and Constantinople look back
to ancient Mediterranean civilization.

Rome, through empire or through church, has spread her ideas
to the eastern bounds of Europe-of-the-Sea, to the border of the
Pripet Marshes in the centre, and farther north, to the surround
of the Baltic Sea.  On the south the boundary of Roman work
persistent in the Church is largely the periphery of the Adriatic
Sea, with complex interrelations between Rome and Byzantium
all over South-east Europe.  In the parts of the Balkan Peninsula
more easily reached from Constantinople, and on the Russian
plain with its prehistoric links via Kief, &c., with Byzantium and
the Aegean, the Byzantine organization of the Church has
persisted.  In South-east Europe, the Danubian lands and the
Carpathian arc, we have the debatable zone between the two
organizations, the wedge of weakness into which Islam was able
to penetrate, as Prof. Stanley Roberts has pointed out to me.

Even as far west as Bohemia the first arrival of Christianity
was due to Byzantine work, but the conflict of Constantinople
with Asia and the difficulty of communications were against the
persistence of this element, and the Roman tradition established
itself in Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, and largely in Slavonia.

In the eastern Carpathians an interesting compromise was
reached in the seventeenth century by the recognition of the
Uniate Church acknowledging the Pope, but keeping a Slavonic
ritual.  The persecution of that church by Romanizers in Poland
and by the Byzantine Church of Russia is a great difficulty at
the present time, but it should be understood that the Roman
Church does not dispute the validity of Byzantine orders of
{71}
priesthood and sacraments, so that the difference between Roman
and Greek Christianity does not cut so deep as that between
the Roman Church and western schismatics, such as Calvinists,
Lutherans, Anglicans, and so on.

On the other hand, very important divergences have grown up
in organization between the two churches in ways which deeply
affect the life of the people.  The western church, based upon
the Roman Empire, has had its waves of enthusiasm in the early
Middle Ages and during the Counter-Reformation for the unity
of Europe, and the differentiation of religious organizations within
the various language groups of Western Europe has been checked.
As a result the more distant ones have seceded from Rome, but
those which remain Roman all own allegiance to the Pope, an
allegiance that creates problems for many a modern state.  Reference
has already been made to the vast importance of the Jesuits
in maintaining this 'universalist' feature of religious and social
life.

In the east, Constantinople, long involved in her ultimately
unsuccessful conflict with Asia and Islam, was not sufficiently
strongly placed to spread analogous waves of enthusiasm.  Also
her lines of communication were decidedly difficult, and her
ambassadors of religion depended more on local factors and local
aid.  Then again some of the lands reached from her knew nothing
of Rome, and here her influence persisted, while others like
Hungary, &c., had been for a time in the empire ruled from
Rome and gravitated to the Roman Church.  The case of Wallachia
and Moldavia must be left for discussion later on.

The Eastern Church has thus carried the universalist idea less
far than the Roman.  It has developed daughter churches, sometimes
with well-marked peculiarities, within the language groups,
so that now allegiance to one or another branch of the Eastern
Church is often made a criterion of nationality in the Balkan
areas of linguistic gradation and confusion.  Religious
{72}
organization has tended to be within the State, and often a substitute
for the State in Eastern Europe, instead of being above the State,
at least in its claims, as in the west.

With these facts of situation, physiography, people, languages,
and religion in mind, we may now proceed to a somewhat closer
survey of the peoples in the chief natural regions of Europe east
of the Teutonic and Romance areas, allowing that the Bohemian
(Czechoslovak) hill people and the Poles have already been dealt
with to a large extent.

To the north of the forest of autumn leaf-fall swamps spread
far and wide between Petrograd and Vologda, and on their
northern flanks the coldness of the soil restricts root action so
much that the pines and the birch are the chief forest trees, and
the forest is only here and there worth clearing for corn growing.
This is a region for hunters and fishers and gatherers, with a few
animals and poor crops in small patches.  Its peoples include
a large element related to and derived from the peoples of Arctic
Asia, Samoyedes, and Lapps, and an element among the Finns,
and it is this element which has provided the languages of the
region in several parts.  The Finn is a mixture of this Asiatic-Arctic
stock of broad-headed, dark-skinned people with the tall,
fair, long-headed peoples of North Europe, and as it is the former
who have provided the language, it is probable that they also
provided the women, i.e. that the Nordics were forest hunters
and adventurers, moving about without many women.  In
Karelia (east of the new republic of Finland) the Finn is more
Asiatic in appearance than he is in Finland itself, and for the
latter people Miss Czaplicka suggests the use of the name
'Finlanders'.  In Karelia and the river basins feeding the White Sea
there is naturally also a considerable Slavonic admixture.  The
antiquity of the Asiatic immigration is a disputed point: it may
be very old, as Peake once argued, but he and others incline to
make the movement fairly recent, and to connect the ancient
{73}
Arctic cultures of the region with old types of long-headed men.
Near the Baltic coast the physical type of the people becomes
practically pure Nordic in several places, and some districts on
the coast speak Swedish, as do the people of the Aland Islands.

The south-west of Finland is so much influenced by the sea
that it has a zone of the forest of leaf-fall, and thus can grow
reasonable amounts of corn.  On it stand the essentially European
cities of Abo and Helsingfors, and the relation to the sea and the
west is shown not only in the fact that 'Baltic' style characterizes
most Finnish things, but also in the fact that Finland became
Roman Catholic under the influence of missions from Sweden
in the twelfth century.  It thus contrasts with the regions farther
east, which were Christianized by the Eastern Church.  Until
the rise of Russia as a power, Swedish influence was dominant in
Finland, but the growth of Petrograd and the efforts of Russian
power to organize itself in a western fashion altered the balance
and Russia became dominant, taking Finland definitely into the
Tsar's domains in 1809.  In the nineteenth century long and
vain attempts were made by autocratic Russia to work in double
harness with Finland, which belonged so markedly to Western
Europe by tradition, had seceded from the Roman Church and
become Protestant at the Great Schism, and was feeling, along
with Western Europe, the nationalist revival with its literary
movement attempting in this case to perpetuate Finnish and
develop it as a culture language.  As in some other northern
regions (notably Norway) the aristocracy merged itself in the
people, and became the leader-element in trade and commerce.
The small amount of good land has made it a precious possession,
and the Finlanders are keenly interested in peasant proprietorship.
In all these ways the contrast between them and Russia is strongly
marked, and the new rulers of Russia have evidently recognized
this in their treaty with the now sovereign state of Finland.
Finland's timber is a precious asset, and her cattle are likely to
{74}
bring her some wealth; her future is as a Baltic people, and it
may be hoped a member of a future Baltic federation.  The
Alanders inhabit a maze of islands, which are a partially
submerged extension of the Finnish plateau;
their historic associations
have been with Finland, but, like the people of some coastal
regions of Finland, they speak Swedish.  The League of Nations
has suggested for them a scheme of local autonomy under Finland,
and this is under consideration, but they seem to wish for a closer
link with Sweden.  Such a link educationally and religiously would
be of value, and we have here merely one more example of the
hampering effects of our present undue insistence on the idea
of the sovereign state rather than on that of the United States
of Europe.  The Karelians and other Finnish peoples of the
north, east of Finland, have been affected a good deal by monastic
settlements made by the Eastern Church; they may get a living
partly by lumbering and partly in fur trade; cultivation and even
stock-raising must remain poorly developed.

Turning south of the line from Petrograd to Vologda we are,
at least theoretically, in the zone of the forest of leaf-fall, that
is a forest with the oak and birch, not, however, the beech.  Here
again the Baltic coast lands have peoples strongly marked off by
culture associations from those of the interior, but, as regards
the interior, the penetration of Finnish or more broadly Asiatic
influences is not nearly so marked until we come to the Volga
below Kazan, where are to be found the Mordva.  In this eastern
region are also found groups of Tatar speech and Asiatic origin,
some of whom were gradually forced by past Russian governments
to give up nomad pasturing and become settled cultivators.
A Tatar republic now centres round Kazan (1921).  An Asiatic
influence may nevertheless be traced far and wide in the physique
of the Russian people of Muscovy, though they owe their main
inheritance to the broad-headed, dark, central European stock
which has colonized the Russian forest bit by bit from the more
{75}
open lands of the Polish-Galician platform, moving around the
south side of the Pripet Marshes and entering the Muscovite
forest via the Dnieper crossing at Kief.  An important element
in the life of the people has been their association with the
mediaeval fur trade of the Hanse, and a study of Russian physique
suggests a Nordic sprinkling all over the country, and especially
among the landowners; but the villagers are mainly of the
broad-headed type, characteristic of the mountain axis of Europe,
albeit in the better lands taller than they are in the Alps and
Cevennes, and in other ways also more like some types found in
the Balkan Peninsula.

The social study of the people of Central Russia is probably one
of the best clues to the understanding of that stage of our own
past, in Western Europe, when settlement in forest-clearings was
the most marked feature of development of social organization.
The Tsar's Government had in recent years persisted in a policy
of modernization of rural arrangements, but, in the words of
a supporter of that policy, the villagers fell back upon their old
communist schemes as soon as the war crisis made them rely on
themselves; it was the one scheme they understood.

How far this is really true, or how far some at least of the
villagers tried to develop individual proprietorship, must remain
doubtful, but there can be no doubt that localism and the Soviet
idea have become marked features in Russia, with the paralysing
of the more modern schemes of life which were previously trying
to spread in the country with the growth of industry and commerce.
That the more modern schemes seemed to permit a larger population
seems clear, but that they were faced with difficulties due
both to climate and to history is not always appreciated.  The
west in the nineteenth century was too apt to think its individualism
applicable to all conditions and peoples the world over; it had
not sufficiently understood its individualism as a historic growth
under western conditions which masked the conflict, for example,
{76}
between it and the Christianity the west supposed itself to accept.
Of the life of the Russian village we shall have more to say later
on, but it is well to have its attitude in mind so that we may
contrast this with the characteristics of the Baltic fringe.  Here,
since the war, new states have been created and recognized (1921)
by the League of Nations under the names of Esthonia, Latvia,
and Lithuania.

The two first have a Baltic-German element which has in the past
been a land-holding class, and has its historic links both with the
Teutonic Knights and with the Hanse--for Riga is an old Hanse
city of special importance.

The Finnish element is strong enough in Esthonia to impose
its language on the people, but farther south tongues of ancient
Baltic lineage are dominant, and the new states are largely on
a basis of peasant language, the German elements being
disregarded, and to a considerable extent dispossessed.  Having
passed through a stage of feudal subjection, the peasants are bent
on individual proprietorship, as they were in the eighteenth
century in France; and the war has brought a social revolution
along this border zone between the domains of the two churches,
with some marked resemblances to that of 1789-93 in France.
In Esth-speaking country there is but little forest that is not pine,
and only 10 per cent. of the soil can be made arable, it is said.
Though the Lett country is better, it can grow neither beech
nor oak to any extent; it is interested in dairying, and in this
matter naturally has commercial links with Denmark.  The
Lithuanians are a grave European problem; they escaped the
Germanizing efforts of the Teutonic Knights, and felt instead the
Polonizing of their aristocracy, the abler scions of which have long
found opportunities at Warsaw.  Set in the Lithuanian country
is Vilna, the station on the one reasonably dry entry from the
west into Central Russia, and therefore a trading town with large
German, Jewish, and Polish elements illustrating more tragically
{77}
than any other town the difficulty of creation of states in this
eastern boundary zone of Western Europe.  The forests of
Lithuania are very important for the country's economic future.

Thus south, as north, of the Petrograd-Vologda line, we have
contrasted conditions in the west, the centre, the east, but on
the south the Finn element is much less marked, and the central
European one much more so.  Moving south again beyond the
Pripet marshes we find corresponding contrasts.

On the west the Polish platform grades south-eastward into
the Ukraine or Border Land, with its great stretches of loess,
but also its patches of forest, especially near the waterways.
The forest thins out towards the open steppe of South Russia,
which in turn grades into desert patches near the Caspian.  The
open steppe of South Russia is but the continuation of the great
steppes of Asia.

To understand the peoples of this belt let us remember first
that the ancient graves contain many long-headed skulls, and that
this element in the people probably persists to a greater extent
than average figures show, in spite of the pressure of central
European, of late at least Slavonic-speaking, immigrants from the
west via Kief, and of Tatar immigrants from the east.  Byzantine
elements from the south need also to be allowed for in the people
as well as in their civilization, in which matter Kief has become
as markedly the Byzantine sacred city of Russia as Canterbury is
the Romano-Gallic sacred city of England.

In the Ukraine Poles have done a good deal of organizing work,
and put themselves in the position of landowners and leaders over
a Ruthenian peasantry.  The landlords were attached to the
Roman Catholic faith, but the peasants to the Uniate Church
until the latter was crushed by Russia.  The border of the
Ukraine towards the steppe is a very doubtful matter.  Here
is the zone of unrest, with Tatar pressure at times and European
pressure at others; it is the limit of the settled life, and the
{78}
cultivated patches have needed specially watchful defence.  Under
these conditions the Cossack people have grown up with a military
order of society and landholding for service.  The people seem
to include an element of the old long-headed population (see
pp. 11, 14, and 77), together with both Slav and Tatar contributions,
Jews and Germans in the towns which are mostly of recent
creation, and a motley gathering of escaped serfs and landless
men from all around.

The Don Cossacks are fairly distinct from the Orenburg and
Siberian Cossacks who live east of the desert patches that lie
north-west of the Caspian Sea.  In what is broadly Cossack
country lies the very different Kuban country, with an almost
Mediterranean climate and possibilities of fruit cultivation; it
is said to have had an autonomous organization of its own for
some time during the recent years of unrest.  Its people are
doubtless related to various elements among the Cossacks, but
one gathers that the descendants of old traders are more marked
than elsewhere.  The Tatar (Turki) groups are so obviously an
intrusion from Asia that we need not say much about them as
such; we may more profitably think of them as pressing upon
Europe at one time and being pressed upon by Europe at another.

Their tribal organization on a kinship basis and their mobility
have given them a power and a cohesion for offensive purposes
from time to time, and as Huns, Magyars, Bulgars, Szeklers, and
Tatars, they have been formidable hindrances to the settlement
of East and South-east Europe on western lines.  We may note
first that Huns, Magyars, Szeklers, and Bulgars, penetrating far
from the South Russian steppe either past the Iron Gates, or
through the Carpathians or over the Danube into the Balkan
Mountains, have become settled folk.

In Hungary they have formed a landed aristocracy with its
rural dependants, while leaving the peopling of the towns largely
to Jews and Germans and persons of mixed blood.  In the Balkan
{79}
Mountains under less spacious conditions and with Turk
interference they have merged into a South Slav people, but have
modified that people and its language in the course of the process.
In South and East Russia there are many groups still distinct, and
the Crimea has long been theirs in principle.  The relation of
these Asiatic warriors with Muscovy makes up the political
history of the Middle Ages in the future Russian plain, and when
that plain did become Russian, its religious autocracy found
greater possibilities of co-operation with the Asiatic element than
with the Western Powers then developing so fast towards
industrialism.  So it came about that Peter the Great's historic
experiment in westernization, difficult for reasons of climate,
position, and opportunities, failed, and the Tsardom was drawn
towards the Orient on the whole against its will.

The westward path of the Asiatic herdsmen beyond South
Russia led them into Moldavia and Wallachia, where the native
Vlach population sought refuge in the Carpathians and in the
hills of the centre of the Balkan Peninsula.  It is a population
with a language of Latin syntactical affinities, and a 60 per
cent. Slav vocabulary, and is spoken by people who looked back with
pride to the days of Roman occupation of their land as Dacia.
So the Vlach people, essentially Central European round-heads
like the Slavs generally, have come to be distinct from their
neighbours in speech and in pride.  In the matter of religion the
openness of the Danube entry and the coastal ways up the west
side of the Black Sea have made the people members of the
Eastern Church so far as Moldavia and Wallachia are concerned,
but the Vlachs of the Transylvanian hills are, or were, to
a large extent members of the Uniate Church (p. 70),
intermediate, as has been said, between the Roman and the Eastern.
After centuries of subjection and fractionization the Vlach peoples
have (1919) suddenly found themselves united in the new
Rumania, with the political and agrarian influence wrested from
{80}
their former Magyar, Szekler, and German lords, and the
peasantry of Wallachia and Moldavia have also secured a good
deal of the land previously in aristocratic, though in this case
often not alien hands.  The old direction of the country was in
the hands of the aristocracy, and was often much criticized in
the west.  The Jewish and German town populations were said
to be specially held down.  Whether the new government will
merely continue the old with a peasant admixture or whether it
will seek to take a new line, remains to be seen.  It is at any rate
interesting that this large language group is, for the first time,
a governmental unit, and tragic that so inexperienced a group
has within it such large and, for that matter, valuable elements
of alien language.  It is said that the Oriental aspect of society
is well marked in the lesser towns, the greater having been
westernized, but it is questionable whether we should not be
more correct in describing these lesser towns as more resembling
our own in early mediaeval times before the garden-closes were
built upon to accommodate people crowding within their walls
for protection.

The Vlachs beyond the new Rumania, in the centre of the
Balkan Peninsula, illustrate for us a noteworthy problem of that
troubled region.  Whereas if we wish to get a picture of the
early stages of the settled life of cultivation in Europe we naturally
look to Russia, we may go to the Balkans for glimpses of the
remnants of the still earlier scheme of society when kinship groups
moved from place to place with flocks and herds.  In the Peninsula
the western mountains shelter many a clan of ancient local
lineage, and much as these mountain clans have been affected by
Slav, Bulgar, Greek, Roman, Turkish, Magyar, and German-Austrian
pressure, a considerable group have remained true to
their pre-Slavonic language (Albanian), and, despite deep religious
differences amongst themselves, seem to tend towards some vague
national unity, largely as a protection against Greek and Slav in
{81}
the next generation.  It is well to realize that these old
populations, even when Slavonized, are often most distinct from the
Slavs, and that they and the Vlachs are the nearest approaches
we have to an autochthonous population in the Peninsula.  They
for the most part limit their movements to seasonal shifts up and
down hill, and, like the Highlanders of Scotland and others
similarly situated, have done their share of raiding on valley
cultivators, for if 'the mountain sheep are sweeter, the valley
sheep are fatter', as Peacock put it.  Among the Albanian peoples
the Greek Church has done a good deal of propaganda at various
times, and as they are near the Adriatic and the Roman Via
Egnatia, the Roman Church has also used opportunities of
reinforcing them against Greek pressure.  Moreover, all along this
mountain country Manichaean ideas replaced old heathendom
and primitive Christianity alike, and with the Manichaean
objection to symbolism and all approach to idolatry there was
a natural tendency to accept Islam without too much difficulty,
when it was brought by conquerors.  So along the western
mountains of the Balkan Peninsula are many old groups confirmed
in their ancient possessions by the Turk, and practising
Islam in succession to Manichaean doctrines rather than to
Christianity.  As the people on the fringes of the truly Albanian
clans speak two languages, in many cases there is as much doubt
about the proper political boundary of an Albanian state as there
would be about that of a Welsh state were it proposed to make
one separate from and hostile to England!  Much harm has
recently been done by conscientious demarcators taking the
frontier line along 'empty' ridges which were really summer
pastures or ways thereto for many a shepherd clan now cut off
from its livelihood and ruined or forced to maraud.  Among the
Albanian clansmen the leaders are often rather fine types with
the strength arising from a long maintenance of tradition, the
change to Islam not having been as fundamental as might be
{82}
supposed.  It is the more regrettable that the antipathies
between them and their Slavonized brethren should have become
so acute.

In the west of the peninsula, north of the region of Albanian
speech, many of the people are Slavonized autochthones, rather
than real Slav intruders, and this is true of the mountains of
Montenegro and of Bosnia, in the latter of which large numbers
of the landed folk are Muslim.  The Slav peoples have, however,
penetrated everywhere from the valleys of the Save and Morava,
though one can still often recognize the old hill-type at sight.
Both are broad-headed, and are branches of the same basal stock,
but the old hill-type is often bigger and more lithe, and there
seem to be accompanying mental differences.  At any rate these
distinctions were found practically useful in contacts with refugees
from Serbia in the recent war.  The distinction between the
Illyrio-Slav and the Bulgar-Slav on the west and east of the
Balkan Peninsula is one with indefinite gradations and with
collateral complications due to Vlach elements on the hills and
long-established Greek elements along the coastal plain.  The
appeal to race and language as a basis for political division is
almost futile; the appeal to history is misleading, for as in the
early west of Europe, so also here we find sudden growths and
more sudden collapses of empires based upon the ability and
ambitions of a leader; the appeal to religion has been encouraged
by the fact that Eastern Christianity tends to encourage national
churches and has education in its hands.  We thus find that the
Bulgars by educational propaganda made their variant of Balkan
speech the definitive one in most of Macedonia, and that the
conflict between them and the Serbs has become fatally acute,
the more so as both have been used as cat's-paws by the Great
Powers of Europe ever since the Turkish hold weakened.  The
erection of organized political frontiers within the Peninsula
limited the power of movement of the wandering shepherds, and
{83}
seems to have affected especially the Vlach elements of the centre,
which are said to be losing their separate character and to be
settling down.  It also sharpened the internecine conflict, especially
since Russia, France, and Britain saw their opportunity of using
Serbia, from 1906 onwards, to resist the Central Powers, while
Bulgaria became of less interest to the Tsardom as she grew strong
enough to do without Russian tutelage.

Broadly then, while Russia gave us an example of the poor
success of an attempt to fasten a State organization on a population
deeply immersed in localism and traditionalism but settled
and cultivating the land, the Balkan Peninsula illustrates tragically
the weaknesses of competing attempts to fasten State organizations
on a population, parts of which have as yet barely reached
the stage of settlement.  The difficulties within the Peninsula
are undoubtedly enhanced by the sharp contrasts between the
highland interior and the coastal fringe on which for milleniums
already the influences of Crete and Babylon, Phoenicia, Greece
and Rome have been playing.

It is a Mediterranean fringe with its hoe cultivation and
olive-trees already long established as the successors of an ancient
barley culture, and it has trade as such a long-standing secondary
feature of its life that observers not infrequently mistake it for
the primary one.  Roman ideas have spread along the Istrian and
Dalmatian shores, and, in spite of Slavonizing influences, have
remained strong at Zara, Fiume, and Trieste, while, though
Croatia and Slavonia have remained Slavonic, their religion has
become Roman Catholic and their alphabet western.  It thus
comes about that a not very deep difference of language between
the Slav regions of Serbia, on the one hand, and of Slavonia and
Croatia on the other is emphasized because the one uses the
Cyrillic alphabet, the others the western, and each has its systems
of schools on a religious basis, a serious problem for the new State
of Yugoslavia.  It is probable that the recent settlement of the
{84}
Adriatic quarrel between Italy and Yugoslavia represents a fair
compromise so far as the two are concerned.

South of Albania and around the Aegean the coastal fringe is
dominated by the Greek element, and the new Greece claims to
include all these coastal lands and to have the reversion of
Constantinople, the great inter-continental city which at the same
time commands the way from the steppe-lands to the Great Sea.
Constantinople is the more maritime successor of the less maritime
Troy of antiquity, and this, in conjunction with its history as
the basis of the Eastern Empire, the head-quarters of the Eastern
Church, and the seat of the Caliphate of Islam, all seems to argue
against its absorption in a nation-state organization and its
government by trustees acting not less for Islam than for Europe.
The problem of Constantinople is also that of the coastal fringe,
wherever the interior is non-Greek.  On the language basis the
Greek claim is strong; on the economic basis, again, the traders
have rights of protection, but the cutting off of the coast from
the interior must be prejudicial to the latter.  Unfortunately,
a trusteeship for government is almost put out of the question
by the fact that practically every European Great Power has
intrigued for a paramount influence, and all are justly suspect.
Thus both the national and the international solution of the
problem of a political and social organization of Balkan life seem
fraught with difficulty, and one can but urge the old, old argument
against preaching 'Peace, peace', where there is no peace.  The
present hope would seem to be in the smaller nations of Europe
and perhaps in the American powers, for Latin America seems
likely to wish to play such a part in the reorganization of the
world as its growing economic importance justifies.

The real difficulties of the Balkan peoples are enhanced in every
way by their disastrous political history, for none have, for centuries
past, had reasonable opportunities of self-expression.  They therefore
lack the experience and the discipline of government, and they
{85}
have little effective written tradition, with the result that what
is written now is often very different from the spoken language
of the peasantry, and is correspondingly artificial and lacking in
healthy standardization.  One may contrast the good fortune of
the Norwegians in having relatively peaceful opportunities of
revival of folk life and in having the wise and luminous Bjornsen
to develop literary expression in continuity with folk tradition.

Of the Turk in Europe one cannot at present say much that is
definite.  He is largely Europeanized in physique, and it is
doubtful whether much that is truly Turk remains in Europe outside
eastern Thrace.  The Muslim elements in Albania and Bosnia
have other origins for the most part, as has been discussed.
Constantinople and Adrianople are markedly Turk.

While, then, the various new states of the Peninsula are largely
on a language basis, it should be noticed that Vlach-speaking
peoples are scattered in groups in what is now Yugoslavia, and
their numbers are variously estimated up to 250,000 or more.
A considerable portion of Yugoslav Macedonia would probably
consider itself Bulgar, and there are Greek elements in the
Macedonian towns.  Apart from Greek elements in the towns there
is little that is alien in the reduced Bulgaria.  Rumania has groups
of many languages and traditions in all her newly acquired
territories, and will need to exercise every care to prevent serious
trouble in the near future.  Yugoslavia includes a good deal of
German, a little Italian, some Magyar, and some Rumanian, as
well as Greek and more or less Bulgar elements, and a neutral
commission should go carefully into the question of the Albanian
boundaries.  Italy's gains in Istria include a large Yugoslav
element.  Greek acquisitions have such a mixed population that
little can be stated in detail.  Finally, the Jewish element is of
widespread importance in the towns; the Ashkenazim (Central
European) element being very strong in Wallachia, and especially
in Moldavia, and the Sephardim element (once Spanish) having
{86}
its head-quarters at Salonica.  Before leaving the Balkan peoples
it should be pointed out that, apart from their ancient hatreds,
there is really every reason for mutual help between them.
Rumania with its wheat and maize, Serbia with its forest-fed
pigs and its plums and other fruits, Bulgaria with its mixed
farming, and the Greek zones with their oil and wine, could
supplement each other if suspicions were diminished and mutual
credit arranged.  The Greek element, with its long experience
of commerce, would be a natural intermediary, as Venizelos
saw when he planned a Balkan Federation; the obvious danger
would be that of exploitation of producers by middlemen,
especially if the latter were in a strong position politically.

The use of Czech, Slovak, Polish, Ruthenian, Serb, Croat, and
Slovene for centuries largely as rural languages, with German to
a considerable extent a lingua franca for educated intercourse,
and Magyar imposed in and around Hungary by an aristocracy,
hindered the growth of the Slavonic languages until the nineteenth
century, and in that century it has been especially Czech,
Polish, and Croat that have pushed forward towards the status
of languages of civilization.  Ruthenian remains in a sense the
most backward member of the group, so much so that its claims
have been conspicuously disregarded by the makers of the recent
treaties.  The Ruthenes west of the Carpathians inhabit a poor
region which is to be included in Czechoslovakia with a measure
of local autonomy.  Ruthenes in what was once Galicia are
largely under Polish proprietors, and that territory is to be
incorporated with Poland, while the Ruthenes of the Bukovina
and the west bank of the Dniester are now included in the
enormously enlarged Rumania.  It may be that under the new
conditions these peoples will settle into the framework created
by the treaties, a framework based to a considerable extent upon
physical geography.  But, on the other hand, if the Ukraine
should become strong and the Ruthenian language develop, there
{87}
is undoubtedly the possibility of the growth of an idea of 'Ruthenia
Irredenta' which may bring difficulties later on.  At present
Ruthenes might well use Russian as their language.

This seems the most appropriate place for a brief catalogue of
the peoples of East-Central and Eastern Europe whose languages
do not belong to the Indo-European family, though many have
already been mentioned.  The Lapps moving between the high
moorlands of Scandinavia and the Kola peninsula speak a language
belonging to the Arctic-Asiatic group and are nomad herdsmen
of the reindeer; their numbers are small, but they provide a
curious background to Scandinavian life; and a certain amount
of intermarriage has caused some Swedes to carry their features.
Forms of Finnish speech, all more or less akin, are widespread from
Finland to the Urals, and the nationalist and democratic
movements of the last century have strengthened the speech of the
Finlanders proper at the expense of Swedish, the old language of
external culture relations in West Finland, and of Russian which
the Tsarist government sought to impose.  Esth is closely related
to Finnish, and under the new conditions of nominal independence
may maintain itself by association with Finnish in spite of poverty
of land and people.  Livonian is related to Esth and still survives
in parts of Latvia.  Various groups of Finns, retaining their
languages, still remain distinct in the government of Perm and
near Kazan and Saratov.  The Tatar groups on the grassland
and desert-border in South-east Russia so obviously belong to
Asia that they may be omitted from this survey.  Like so many
mountain regions the Caucasus forms a refuge for ancient racial
types, old customs, and old forms of speech, but a survey of these
would take us far from European problems.

Bulgar has been mentioned as a language with a Tatar element,
though it has been very largely Slavonized, but this fate has not
overcome the Magyar tongue, which is the distinctive feature of the
erstwhile ruling caste in Hungary and Transylvania.  The language
{88}
is used both by the Magyars of Hungary and by the Szeklers,
who are a people of closely related origins, in parts of
Transylvania.  The people are almost completely Europeanized in their
physique, but as they secured some degree of national cohesion
and of close attachment to their soil at an early stage of history,
their language has lived on, and of late its use has been fostered
by political ambition; it has become a mark of a ruling caste.  It
may now become the rallying ground of aspirations for national
recovery after the collapse of 1918 and the severities of the recent
treaty.  The Powers of Europe in framing the new boundaries
have at least suggested a campaign of linguistic nationalism to the
Magyars, for the reduced Hungary has considerable numbers of
people speaking its language who are now subjects of the states
around its borders.  There has been no incentive to outsiders
to learn Magyar, and it remains isolated in Europe, useless beyond
its homeland and unlikely to contribute much to other languages.




9

  _Some Phases of Evolution of European Life before the
  Industrial Revolution_

We have now glanced around all the chief language groups in
Europe, and in the course of this rapid survey have noted that
whereas the peoples of Romance and Teutonic speech have built
up the organization known as the nation-state, in most cases on
a basis of linguistic unity, the peoples of the Slavonic regions,
with the partial exception of Bohemia, have hardly achieved this.
The intermingling of peoples and the difference of tradition
between town and country over wide areas are in part the cause
of this, but it has also been suggested that, in the east of Europe,
we have still surviving an earlier stage of the process of settlement
in the cleared forest than farther west, while in the south-east
{89}
we note the persistence of elements still hardly settled at all.  It
will therefore repay us if we now try to make a rapid survey of
the evolution of the process of settlement with its variants in
different regions and of the indications of persistence of different
stages of the general process in various parts, chiefly of Eastern
Europe.

All the evidence we have goes to show that after the Würm
Ice Age the first European peoples were hunters apparently
spreading up from the western Mediterranean basin.  To them
must be added the hunters who seem to have spread along the
loess westwards.  These two groups were bearers of the
Aurignacian and Solutrean cultures of anthropologists.  Hunting
has remained a feature of European life ever since, but time has
brought too many changes in the hunter's life and position to
make it profitable to discuss possibilities of social survivals from
so long ago.  The partial regrowth of the glaciers (Bühl period)
modified the hunting life; and associated with this cold-cycle
civilization (Magdalenian Age of the anthropologists) was the
great development of pictorial and sculptural art which has so
astonished the world since its rediscovery.  As the cold passed
away, this time definitively, the sinking of the west converted
Britain and Ireland into islands, and so brought maritime
influences far into the Continent, with the result that forests
spread far and wide with wolf, bear, boar, wild cats, and birds
of prey to dispute them for a time with man.  The zone of loess
and some wind-swept or calcareous areas near the sea or on the hills
remained relatively clear of forests and dry enough for occupation
by man, and on these areas men practised the art of herding
animals, moving from pasture to pasture, as circumstances required
or, increasingly, with the cycle of the seasons.  There were
possibly already cultivators beginning to grow barley as a
supplement to herding or hunting.  We should, however, be careful
not to argue that the beginning of cultivation necessarily implies
{90}
settling down in one place; the Vlachs often sow and reap a
barley crop without making more than a very temporary sojourn.

The development of civilization was not purely and simply
a development of herding from hunting, nor was the herding
purely analogous in social features to that of the tribe on the
grasslands.  The development was accompanied by differentiation,
and it seems clear that herding was very early carried on
with much greater restriction of movement than on the grass-lands
and desert borders of Asia.  There was quite early a tendency
to a regular cycle of seasonal change (_transhumance_) rather than to
broad wandering, and our territorial instinct is very old.

With this statement properly goes another to the effect that
some kind of cultivation became a supplement to the herder's
life almost at the outset, and we may further surmise that some
part of the population would soon remain near the more cultivable
lands to guard them.  Thus restriction of seasonal wandering
to a part of the population is another very old feature of life, one
judges, in many, though not in all parts of Europe.  In the
Val d'Anniviers, so clearly marked that territorial disputes could
hardly arise, and at the same time freed from ravages of wild
beasts, practically the whole population still moves up and down
with the change of the seasons, though it has permanent buildings
at each of its four stations.  Reference has already been made
to the Vlach wanderers of the Balkan Peninsula, and one might
also speak of the Lapps, whose movements along the moorlands
of Scandinavia were formerly a source of frontier trouble between
Sweden and Norway.

With the development of the phase of civilization called
Neolithic in Europe goes the making of pottery, which implies
tendencies to live in one place at least for a time, the utilizing of
particular types of stone from particular spots suggesting a
long-continued exploitation of the special source, the making of very
definite settlements on the Swiss lakes, and the developing of
{91}
crop-growing and weaving and so on by their inhabitants.  Both
settlement and trade seem indicated, but it is most probable that
many of the lake-dwellers also used the spring pastures on the
hills.  The distribution of the great stone monuments and several
other matters indicate the growth of long-distance sea trade
about the end of the Neolithic Age and in the period when the use
of copper and bronze was spreading round the coasts of Europe;
and a recently discovered Mesopotamian tablet dated 2800 B.C. gives
facts about tribute paid to Babylon from tin lands beyond
the Great Sea (Spain).  Development of settlement must have
continued in the Bronze Age, still mainly on the naturally
open lands rather than in the cleared forest, and it is a notable
fact that, save in a very few areas with special explanations
available, the regions of megaliths do not show examples of the kind
of village, with strips once owned in common, which is so
characteristic of regions of cleared forest, though not the only type
there.

The hardening of bronze was one of the most important facts
affecting man's advance in the Bronze Age, and we have
abundant indications (see papers in archaeological and anthropological
journals by H. J. E. Peake) of man's ability to attack the
forest seriously ere bronze gave place to iron.  The attack
on the forest was undoubtedly redoubled when man acquired
iron weapons, and so the Early Iron Age witnessed extensive
settlement in forest clearings in Europe north of the Alps, and
with that went increase of corn-growing.  South of the Alps the
warming of the climate after the Ice Age had helped to reduce
the forest, especially in view of the large stretches of limestone
and the sharp slopes which have always hindered regrowth of
forest once destroyed.

The Mediterranean region, by reason of the long summer
drought, has become with the establishment of its present climate
less fit for pasturing of animals and more suited to the goat than
{92}
to cattle or sheep.  As a result of this the destructive goat has
reduced the forests and hindered their regrowth.  The difficulty
of stock-raising encouraged efforts towards cultivation, which is
certainly very old in the Mediterranean region, and has passed
through several phases that need elucidation.  It seems probable
that barley cultivation was established very early, and bee and
fruit culture were gradually gathered around it, the olive proving
invaluable as a substitute for animal fat.  But ere the olive could
be grown in quantity there had to be a good deal of organization,
for it does not begin to bear till it is almost eight years old, and
is in full bearing when it is nearing its thirtieth year.  To wait
for the olive, therefore, meant possession of some reserves and
assurance of food supplies, such as imported grain, ere much land
could be turned into olive groves.  War and unsettlement worked
against olive culture, for the risks of destruction of an olive grove
were then serious, and the consequences disastrous.

If, however, olive culture was, on the one hand, the result of
a measure of peace and prosperity, it was also in most cases the
presage of further growth of prosperity; the harvest was reasonably
assured and immensely valuable, especially as it could be
transported far and wide by sea.  The relation of olive culture
to the classical period in Greece is well known.  We seem to have
grounds for associating city growth in the Mediterranean with
trade and the spread of large-scale olive culture as well as with
the question of defence.

Both north and south of the Alps the dependence of man on
cereals after he gave up his milk and flesh diet seems to have made
him desire salt, and the Early Iron Age settlements of Gaul are
closely related to sources of salt, while the Mediterranean
coast-lands had ample opportunities of salt getting.  The pig had been
domesticated by this time, and the salting of bacon and fish gave
a reserve for the winter, but it has been claimed that salt was also
in request for forms of porridge, &c.  In thinking of the early
{93}
settlements we should remember that north of the Alps there was
perpetual danger lurking in the dark forest, while in the south
there were the rough goatherds of the mountains.

In the last millennium before Christ the worsening of the
Scandinavian climate drove peoples southwards towards Gaul, and thus
led to a growth of hill-fortress towns, of which the supreme
examples were Alesia, Gergovia, and Bibracte, and from Gaul
the building of these fortress towns spread, with sea commerce,
up the west coast of Britain, where Tre'r Ceiri on Yr Eifl in
Carnarvonshire furnishes us with one of the best examples of this
type of settlement of the Iron Age or Romano-British times.

For the purposes of this sketch it is not necessary to go into
great detail about the Roman efforts, but we should note that
within the bounds of their Empire they spread wheat cultivation,
road communications, and their legal system, and that along with
this seems to have gone a cheapening of iron.  All these changes
helped to knit the people to the soil, to make neighbourhood
take the place of kinship as a basis of association, to root a language
in the people's hearts.  It is the men who 'lacte et carne vivunt',
as Caesar puts it, who organize on a kinship basis, move from
place to place, and lack the written records which do so much for
language fixation.

We thus see in Gaul villages of various types in regions of
differing history and opportunity, but pre-Roman fortress towns
and Roman cities between them networking the country and
related to roads built or adapted by the conquering engineers,
and we note the implanting of linguistic features that not all the
shocks of later disruptions have contrived to uproot.  In Britain
again are villages of varying types, pre-Roman or Romano-British
fortress towns, chiefly on the west coast headlands, Roman cities
for the most part speedily ruined, and Roman roads.  The
difference in the vitality of the cities is to be correlated with the
difference as to language; the Roman elements in our language
{94}
are for the most part the result of reintroduction later on.  The
Roman element in Welsh is usually allowed to be important.

If the spread of the rural Franks and of the Anglo-Saxons into
the erstwhile Roman domains led to the submergence of the old
cities and to much village foundation, there is at any rate a
growing opinion that it did not destroy all continuity in either Gaul
or Britain, that a good deal in our rural life goes back, as above
hinted, to the late Bronze Age.  The system of the manor under
which the villagers give service to a military protector is too easily
mixed up with the village system in discussions.  The manor,
with complex origins, is characteristic of post-Roman days
of movement and strife.  The civilizing element promoting
agriculture and the law is furnished by the Church, which, with
the centuries, spread its work over the Rhine, beyond the bounds
of the Empire, right away to the limits of Europe-of-the-Sea,
that is of the lands near Baltic or Mediterranean, or west of a
north-south line near the east ends of those seas.

With the settling down which heralded the Middle Ages after
the Dark Centuries of movement and war, we thus find the
following broad facts.  In the Mediterranean, where fruit culture
and the city-state and trade were already old, that type of life
reasserted itself even though the division of life on the north and
the south sides (characteristic long before in Phoenician times)
of the sea made grave difficulties.

In Spain the conflict between Islam and Christians inhibited the
development of both and delayed everything.  In both cases the
military organization was unhealthily important, and the Muslim
of the south kept much of their old social scheme based on the
tribe, whereas they should have been adapting themselves to the rich
land of Andalusia which they held.  The result of the inhibitions
made the Muslim far more of a misfit in the Andalusian garden
than were the Christians on the heights of northern Spain, where
seasonal movement of flocks and herds (_transhumance_) is still
{95}
very important.  The Muslim of the south thus gradually declined
both in value and in influence, and though in earlier times they
had been far more cultured than their Christian foemen, they had
dropped far behind in organization before their subjugation in
the fifteenth century.  One should nevertheless bear in mind
possible valuable survivals from the Muslim in matters of detail
or of individual work.  In Gaul cultivation had spread and had
improved under monastic leadership; markets were growing
under protection of the cathedrals, and were becoming the
town centres that have persisted as the highly characteristic
market towns of the Paris basin.  After years of rivalry with
Frankish dialects the old Roman heritage of language triumphed
with some compromises, and became the _langue d'oïl_, the speech of
the Paris basin and upper Burgundy, and the progenitor of standard
modern French.  In Britain the rural element seems to have
predominated until Gaulish influences again became strong in the
eleventh century.

In the lands beyond the Rhine the abbeys were promoting
agriculture, with towns growing some time after the corresponding
phases were carried through in Gaul, and with the power of
the war lord very strongly marked.  In the Slavonic lands the
phases of settlement and town growth are later still with the
church and the war lord in close association, as is exemplified
both by the Teutonic Knights in East Prussia and by the inclusion
of the cathedral in the castle precincts in Prague and Cracow.

Growth of market towns and of communications, still largely
mule tracks no doubt, was leading to fixation of language as
discussed in an earlier chapter.  One may mention, incidentally,
that old mule tracks persist on lands in old-fashioned corners like
the Channel Islands, where they are very numerous, and may
form rings around the demesnes of the more important houses.
The growth of markets was bringing neighbours together, weakening
dialectal differences, and so helping to fuse local groups into
{96}
nations on a basis of common language and common tradition
expressed in growing poetry and prose in the evolving languages.
Against these influences must be set that of the Roman heritage
of universalism so vigorously represented by the Church, which
the Holy Roman Empire tried so hard to imitate.

The poverty of the villagers and their weakness in face of the
dangers of the forest and its wanderers, outlaws, and adventurers
is an outstanding fact of the development of the next phase.
There was insufficient freedom for agricultural experiment save
to some extent in the monastery gardens, and insufficient
knowledge for useful discussion, so cultivation methods remained in
the grip of custom, with the modification due to the spread of
the three-field system.  Even the fallows could not keep the
land up to a proper grade of fertility.

So traditional cultivation on lands owned or worked in common
by the villagers was ever under threat of disruption, and doubtless
the severities of climate and plague in the fourteenth century
contributed their quota to the disintegration of the old mode of
life.  The complaint of diminished fertility made itself heard far
and wide, and the end of the Middle Ages witnessed the breakdown
of the old village system in the west.  Trade and the voyages
of discovery furnished supplementary sources of wealth, and the
beginnings of larger industry grew out of this.  In East-Central
Europe change was delayed partly because there was still much
forest land to be adapted, but largely because of the absorption
of the people in struggles against Turk and Tatar.  Even there,
however, the old village system decayed in the end, and it is only
in central Russia that it has maintained itself among the Slavonic
peoples, who, almost to this day, from one point of view, may be
looked upon as colonists spreading in the forests and their borders
in Muscovy.

Of the lands north of the Mediterranean, France was most
favoured agriculturally, and owed most to the Roman heritage
{97}
of unity, and here grew _la grande nation_, while farther east national
growth was delayed largely by attempts at an imperial unity,
worked up as a device for defence against the Turk and Tatar.
National growth in isolated or semi-isolated lands like the English
plain, Holland, Sweden, and the central Scottish lowland was also
a feature, while the diverse outlooks of the diverse coasts of
Ireland and the weakness of that country's interior made the
Green Isle the tragic type of the island which is so generally
disunited.

Villagers with common lands gave place, with many a struggle,
to landholding by proprietors with labourers under them, and if
in Britain the labourer became landless and so fitted himself to
become machine-fodder in the Industrial Revolution, in France
he struggled to keep his link with the sacred soil of that sunny
land, and ultimately won his position of ownership in the
Revolution of the end of the eighteenth century.  This change
made itself felt as far as the Rhine, beyond which the peasant
still remained subject to heavy seigniorial dues.  It is claimed
that during the recent war there has been a great move towards
peasant proprietorship or something akin to it in the lands near
the eastern border of Europe-of-the-Sea, carrying eastward, as it
were, the work done one hundred years ago in France.

Facts about decline of the old village communities are legion,
and cannot even be listed here, but attention may be drawn to
the spread of root crops (for winter food for man and beast) in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  This helped materially
to break down traditionalism, for it interfered with the old right
of the villagers to free pasture of all the village cattle all over the
stubble left after harvest: the lands with root crops had to remain
enclosed.  Of the new wealth brought in by individual
proprietorship and root crops and other agricultural experiments,
we have much evidence in the farmhouse buildings of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries; those of the years 1720-60 or
{98}
so seem specially characteristic in Guernsey, Channel Islands.
But the problem of fertility was not solved, even though
leguminous crops were ploughed in and the chemical decomposition
of the soil was speeded up by liming.  Trade and long sea voyages
loomed larger in the lives of the European peoples and industry
grew ever larger, so that the urban element gained immensely in
numbers and influence.  We thus have a picture of the preface,
as it were, to the Industrial Revolution, but another series of
changes had been working to the same end.

The spread of the habit of sea trade from the Mediterranean
to North-west Europe led to changes in the design and
construction of ships.  By the middle of the seventeenth century old
difficulties about disease due to stinking bilge-water had largely
been overcome, and ships were being built with better proportions
for speed and manoeuvring, and in the early eighteenth
century came the full adaptation of the fore-and-aft sail and the
use of mahogany and other hard woods from the tropics for
ship furniture, and so for house furniture too.  With all this went
increased size and speed of ships and ability to tack effectively,
and so, broadly, to follow a course even if winds were variable.
With all this new power and also the development of armaments,
Europe found herself in a position to exploit the other parts of
the earth inhabited by other races less well equipped.  They
gradually, nay almost suddenly, became the producers of raw
materials, food-stuffs, and fertilizers for the vastly increasing
populations of industrial Europe, which began to teem in the
manufacturing cities when coal and steam machinery were added
to the European equipment.

Along with this industrial development has gone the nationalist
revival to which reference has already been made in several places
(pp. 23, 33, 35, 49, 62-3), a cultural movement which in the
nineteenth century became politically embittered, and which through
its imperialistic outgrowths in England, Germany, France, and
Russia has been a main factor of the recent war.




{99}

10

_Aspects of Modern Europe_

The Industrial Revolution supervened in England first.  Her
landless labourers, her rather uncertain harvests, her severance
from the Roman tradition at the religious schism, her growth of
sea-power and trade, as well as the invention of James Watt, all
contributed to this end.  The necessary coal was found in places
mostly remote from the great centres of English tradition, and
industry grew where the civic heritage was weak and the lands,
even the common lands of the market towns, had been enclosed
by proprietors, who also often replaced the monks of the
Middle Ages as landlords without attempting to fulfil their
other functions.  The growth of our huge industrial agglomerates
on private land with an oligarchic government of landowners,
and, since 1830, factory owners and their associates, has naturally
had as a result the policy of non-interference, so that crowding
has been permitted and even encouraged, and the slum, which
is now deteriorating the quality of the population, is the inevitable
result, bringing in its train practically all the most serious social
problems of our day, the stunting of growth and judgement, the
craving for excitement and emotion as a substitute for thought,
the aesthetic degradation which carries with it the loss of
keenness on one's work.  To compensate for this we have only got
a vast accumulation of profits in the form of mobile capital, so
much of which has been blown into space in 1914-18.  The
accumulation of capital, it should be appreciated, would have
been far less had it not been that industrial primacy and the
primacy of the carrying trade happened, as above suggested, to
be closely associated in one and the same people.

From England the Revolution has spread along the coal belt
through northern France and Belgium, Germany, Bohemia, and
{100}
Poland to Russia, with characteristic modifications from region
to region, according to the local circumstances and social heritage
of the people affected.  But before proceeding to note these
differences it is important to realize one general change which
has many aspects.  In the old village with its law based on the
custom of the neighbourhood, each had his or her place unless
cast out: one's status was all-important and not easily changed.
In England the labourer became landless, drifted to the factories,
made a contract for his labour, and so changed the organization
of society from an organization based on status to one based on
contract.  That change is still going on, and the remnants of old
ideas of status have struggled hard against such measures as
death duties, super-tax, and the rest, which all tend in the
direction of making labour, however disguised, the great medium
of exchange.  This big alteration from status to contract has
affected the whole of industrial Europe and has spread thence as
a ferment of change far beyond our continent, but in Europe the
change has hardly anywhere gone so far as it has in Britain.

In France coal was far less abundant than it was in England, and
the struggle for the soil went in favour of the peasantry rather
than of the plutocracy as with us.  Both these facts, added to
those of the sunny climate, have made the Industrial Revolution
far more feeble in France.  The antiquity and continuity of life
in the market towns has led to the persistence of small industries,
often with a very long-standing personal link between master
and men; hence the difficulty of the impersonality of industrial
organization from which we suffer so badly in Britain is less
general in France, though they also have the limited company
to contend with.  The wealth of the country for so many
centuries has encouraged high-class--one might say,
luxurious--manufacture, and jewellery, porcelain,
and silk are characteristic
products.

The persistence of special quality lines in the cloth trade
{101}
is another feature, but on the whole the story of French industry
has been one of half-hearted effort only.  The Treaty of Versailles
puts an enormous amount of iron ore into the French Customs
Union, so that France becomes by far the greatest European
producer of iron minerals, though her coal supply is deficient.  It
remains to be seen whether the French people will develop more
industrial activity in consequence of this, and also whether they
will go in for increased use of the hydro-electric power they have
within their territory.

The Flemings have an old-established industrial and commercial
tradition much less divorced from peasant life than in our country.
Their Walloon neighbours, on the other hand, have entered into
industrialism recently, and their country has changed suddenly
from a backward rural area to a very busy manufacturing one,
using large quantities of imported raw material.  The people were
cultivators and stock-raisers by long tradition, and they have tried
to keep up this activity in some measure, while a protective
customs duty on meat keeps up the stock-raising business.  Another
traditional (in fact racial) feature here is the genius for
co-operation, and this works itself out in widespread insurance schemes
maintained by the people.

Among the Germans the background of industrial development
was very different from that which we have noted in Britain.
Where the river valleys leave the hills for the northern plain are
old cities of great dignity and fame, and though they were
somewhat decadent after the decay of the Hanse, they were strong
enough to keep their common lands and their tradition of city
government from the Middle Ages.  Coal was found along this
zone, and it became industrialized, but the new movement had
to respect the cities, which grew often on public land.  The old
city of Nürnberg developed industrial refinements on the basis
of craftsmanship, which owed a great deal to the old business of
distributing goods from the East brought up from Venice to its
{102}
mart.  There was thus neither on the one hand the same general
growth of slums as in Britain, nor on the other the accumulation
of immense profits from slum development to be used as liquid
capital for speculative purposes.  Moreover, the industrial effort
in Germany was contemporaneous with the effort to make Germany
a real nation-state, and each movement influenced the other.
Much thought was given to the question of the national balance-sheet,
and industry was made to help agriculture by conversion
of waste products into fertilizers.  Thus, though Germany was
experiencing the same cityward drift of people as Britain, her
agriculture remained in a far stronger position than ours, and with
that went the probability of better maintenance of the quality of
the people.  The wasting of resources on war, the distrust created
by aggressive intrigues, the loss of territory and minerals, and the
loss of health of the people through the blockade, all imply
changes in the situation of the German people, the consequences
of which it is difficult to foresee.

German industry utilized Polish labour in large quantities, and
was much concerned with the westward-flowing Slavonic stream
which was said to be altering the character of the German people.
On the other hand, a German stream of organization flowed
eastward and south-eastward, and the industrial fever made great
strides in the latter half of the nineteenth century in Bohemia,
in Austria proper, in Upper Silesia, and in Poland.  In Bohemia it
emphasized the differences between German and Slavonic elements
of the people; in Upper Silesia and in Poland the Germans were
mainly found in the towns, especially in the leader class, and often
difference of language and sentiment between masters and men
was a very undesirable feature.

Polish industrial centres were correspondingly notorious for
their bad social conditions before the war.

The industrial fever spread to Russia, and of its entry into that
country we get a useful sketch in Kropotkin's _Fields, Factories,
{103}
and Workshops_.  Here was a country with marked seasonal cycles,
and often at first manufacture was made a winter occupation,
and was hoped by some to offer a means of rescuing many of the
people from some of the evils of the severe Russian winter.  In
the Ukraine Poles seem to have done a good deal of the industrial
organization, and it was natural that German experience should
carry great influence.  It was said that the co-operative,
even communist, traditions of the people accounted for much
in the form of organization of industry, the guilds or artels being
a distinctive feature.  Needless to say that, with transport ill
developed, education neglected, and self-government impossible
under the Tsar, Russian industry was of doubtful efficiency and
social conditions bad.  One must, however, remember that
industry was only beginning.

In addition to the main zone of industry which we have now
followed along the coal zone from Britain to Russia, the attempt
was made near small coalfields elsewhere, and even at times away
from coal, to glean some of the wealth industry brought.  About
1895, however, hydro-electric power became transmissible over
long distances and thus much more applicable.  This change
created new regions of industry in Scandinavia and around the
Alps.  Both Sweden and Norway use this power, and it has
made an immense difference, especially to Norway.  In the case
of Norway the weakness of class distinctions has led to the careful
organization of good social conditions, in spite of serious
difficulties because of the very limited sites available.  In Switzerland,
South Germany, and Italy, up to 1914, the use of hydro-electric
power was creating a valuable community of interest and problems
that was drawing the whole region together, while Switzerland
was becoming strong economically in a way undreamed of before.
Post-war developments will need to be watched with care and
breadth of view.  Hydro-electric power was being developed in
pre-war France, and will probably be a great help to that country
{104}
if greater care is taken on the social side than was taken in the
early stages of the movement.  It has been claimed that a
hydro-electric power system could be developed all around the Iberian
plateau, and something is said to have been done recently towards
its development.  In the British Isles only a few spots can give
enough power to make an installation an economic success in the
present state of knowledge, so that in a water-power age Britain
would have a minor position.  It seems doubtful at present
whether this form of power will become anything more than
an accessory.  It is noteworthy that in the Alpine region it helps
a population fundamentally inclined to patient detailed work to
build up an industry in fine electrical machinery partly developed
from an old watchmaking tradition.

The utilization of tidal power has been debated, and a scheme
for the Severn estuary, as well as one for the north coast of Brittany,
has been elaborated.  Should this line of development be followed
in the future, Britain's position and the power of the tides at
several points would assist greatly.

For the present, however, the fashionable power is oil, of which,
so far as is known, Britain has only a very little, and in which the
whole of Western Europe is also poor.  But oil is rather easily
transportable, and Western Europe's powers of transport are being
used to exploit sources of oil in such places as are not already in
the sphere of influence of the United States of America.  However
this may be disguised, it is none the less an indication of Europe's
increasing dependence on other regions for what her industry
needs.  Large amounts of raw products now come from outside
Europe, and if power also comes from afar, Europe's advantages
will be restricted to her climate in its relation to efficiency, her
capital, her tradition of skill which she has endangered by the
enormous amount of specialization developed among her workers,
and her ownership and control of transport by sea.  On this last
point it is noteworthy that the great advance made by the
{105}
United States of America does not seem to be fully maintaining
itself.

For the immediate future the incalculable water-power available
in the monsoon lands, the immense and easily workable deposits
of coal in Shansi (North China), the coal and oil available in and
near the United States of America, the huge water-power that
might be utilized in several parts of America, the possibilities of
tidal power in many regions, and the production of power-alcohol
from equatorial vegetation, are all interesting factors of a situation
the precariousness of which for the thickly populated areas of
Western Europe is obvious to all.  With their organization based
upon skill and patience, the peoples of Central Europe may well
go on developing, perhaps even exploiting, the Russian and
Turanian lands on their eastern flank, as these latter do not seem
likely to become industrial for some time.  On the other hand,
a Sino-Japanese development of industry on a large scale is always
possible, and, if wisely managed, should have the benefit of the
skill, taste, and honesty of the Chinese merchant as well as of the
skilful industry of the Chinese workman, whose frugality and
cheerfulness would make him a formidable competitor.  The
signs of the times are thus in favour of the departure of industrial
primacy from Europe, however much political effort may contrive
to delay the change.

Before following out this thought it will be best to mention
some of the collateral developments in European and other lands
more indirectly affected by industrialism.  The huge factory
populations need food, and the imported food supply of Europe
is an enormous problem.  Cereals and some fruits may be carried
with ease, but the factory hands and especially the miners and
furnacemen need meat, and though meat can be carried in
refrigerators or alive, yet imported meat suffers through transport.
While therefore Australia, Argentina, and other regions are very
busy supplying stock products, there is a good deal of stock-raising
{106}
and dairy work to be done in Europe.  Holland and Denmark
have specialized in this matter, and the latter made herself a centre
for dairy produce from Holland and Lithuania and even Russia
before 1914.  With political and social peace Ireland would
undoubtedly develop in this way.  Several hill regions, like Central
France and parts of Switzerland, were also busy stock-raising, and
are likely to prosper in this direction if European industry
maintains itself.

In Switzerland the high ledge-pastures or alps have a remarkable
growth of hay in spring after the snow melts, and this gives
advantages over our British high lands.  For their better utilization
it would be necessary to improve the breeds of grasses, and
important experiments for this purpose are in progress in Wales.
In the Highlands of Scotland the population is decreasing fast,
and thus Britain is losing a most valuable element in her
population, an element trained to endure hardness and traditionally
interested in serious thought.

The large financial resources of industrial populations and the
thriftlessness so inevitably developed under the circumstances of
their life in its present anarchic phase, further lead to a demand
for luxury foods, flowers, and so on, and Holland and the Channel
Islands are notable providers of these extras.  The increase of
fine machinery and other factors make it fairly certain that olive
oil will have a good market for a long time, even if pea-nut oil
is used alongside of it.  Olive oil and fruits offer opportunities
for the Mediterranean.

Thus practically every part of Europe is directly or indirectly
brought into the process of industrial development, and all are
increasingly dependent on the world outside, however much the
German people may have tried to maintain their agriculture.

This dependence and the precariousness of Europe's industrial
position, added to the fact that with an effort and some amount
of goodwill the peoples of Europe could grow to understand one
{107}
another, especially in view of their common debt to the Roman
heritage, make it unthinkable that what is practically civil war
can be tolerated much longer in Europe.  Before 1914 the Labour
Movement was clearly working towards the weakening of the
idea of the nation-state and its sovereignty, but the events of
1914 showed that the movement had not yet gained a real hold
on men's imagination.  The new League of Nations movement
is an evidence of development of the same line of thought among
the thinkers of the Continent, and is slowly gathering momentum
through the creation of institutions with laws for their guidance,
and the promise of the growth of a body of lawyers as interested to
maintain those institutions as the lawyers of the nation-states have
been to maintain that form of organization.  The League has had
to take up the question of the relations of Europe to distant lands,
and has stood for a principle of trusteeship, the fate of which is
trembling in the balance.  The more hopeful Europeans see signs
of the growth of co-operation, and find indications of it even as
between France and Germany.  Britain is torn between the
attitudes of solidarity with Europe and of aloofness from Europe
and association with distant lands of English speech.  Perhaps
the improvement of the League of Nations scheme or its
transformation after discussions with the leaders of the United States
of America will give a means to put an end to this dilemma by
reconciling both aims.

Therein lies one of the greatest hopes for the salvaging of
civilization, though Britain's other problem of rescuing her
population from degenerative tendencies due to industrialism is
as clamant for solution if the world's peace is to develop.  That
industry should spread, that every people should maintain an
agricultural background, and that the peoples of Europe should
find means to co-operate in matters of imports from the tropics,
transport arrangements, and labour conditions, must be the hope
of all who think of the future seriously, even if this means the
{108}
discarding of ambitions of power which in less critical times
disguised themselves under the cloak of patriotism.  This does
not mean the destruction of patriotism, but rather its ennoblement
into a passion for the well-being and the health of future
generations of the people, for the enrichment of each heritage
of language, literature, tradition, and art by active effort, and for
the growth of that toleration which is the accompaniment of
self-control and its attendant liberty and peace.


[NOTE.--The writer wishes to express his most sincere thanks to
his friends and fellow workers in the fields of research concerned,
especially to Miss R. M. Fleming and Mr. H. J. E. Peake, and
the late Professor V. Giuffrida-Ruggeri.]




{109}

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Among the most important general reference works one must mention the
chief encyclopaedias, Reclus's _Géographie universelle_
(also in English), the
_International Geography_,
the _Dictionnaire de Géographie universelle_ (V. de
S. Martin).  Ratzel's _Anthropogeographie_
and Brunhes's _La Géographie humaine_
and _Géographie humaine de la France_
should also be mentioned here.  Bowman,
_The New World_, has a fine collection of maps
relating to the political
resettlement of Europe.

On Race Questions the standard book is
W. Z. Ripley's famous work, _The
Races of Europe_, supplemented by
G. Sergi's _Europa_ in Italian and by a
number of papers by Keith, Parsons, Peake, Fleure,
and others in the _Journal
of the Royal Anthropological Institute_
during the last ten years.  Dr. Haddon
and Mrs. Quiggin have issued a valuable
revision of Keane's _Man, Past and
Present_.  Déchelette's _Archéologie_
is the standard work in its field and may
be supplemented from Burkitt's _Prehistory_
and Macalister's _Archaeology_.

On Languages and their Distribution the student may begin by consulting
A. Meillet's _Les Langues dans l'Europe nouvelle_
and L. Dominian on _Frontiers
of Language and Nationality in Europe_.
From these books a bibliography can
be compiled to suit the student's purpose.

The evolution of social conditions in Europe
is so complex that it has not
as yet received synthetic treatment,
but some tentative efforts are useful if
read critically.  Among them one may note
the files of _La Science sociale_ and
Demolins's _Comment la route crée le type social_,
Guizot's _Histoire de la
Civilisation en Europe_, Kropotkin's _Mutual Aid_,
his _Fields, Factories, and Workshops_,
and his _Memoirs of a Revolutionist_,
as well as Jenks's works, such as the little
_History of Politics_, and Geddes's _Cities in Evolution_.

It is impossible to give an adequate list of books
on special regions, but the
following will be found of value for various parts
of the Continent involved in
the recent treaties:

P. Vidal de la Blache, _Tableau de la Géographie
de la France_; P. Vidal de
la Blache, _La France de l'Est_; R. Blanchard,
_La Flandre_; H. J. Mackinder,
_The Rhine_; _Atlas de Finlande_; P. Leroy Beaulieu,
_The Empire of the Tsars_;
A. B. Boswell, _Poland and the Poles_; J. Cvijic,
_La Péninsule balkanique_;
M. I. Newbigin, _Geographical Aspects
of Balkan Problems_; M. E. Durham,
{110}
_The Burden of the Balkans_; E. de Martonne,
_La Valachie_; A. Philippson,
_Das Mittelmeergebiet_; D. G. Hogarth, _The Nearer East_.

Further guidance to books on regions of Europe will be found in the
valuable handbooks issued by the British Government in two series,
i.e. the handbooks issued by the Intelligence Department
of the Admiralty, and
the handbooks issued by the Historical Section of the Foreign Office.

The reader interested in some of the problems may wish to consult
J. Fairgrieve's _Geography and World-Power_,
H. J. Mackinder's _Democratic Ideals and
Reality_, H. J. Fleure's _Human Geography in Western Europe_,
and C. B. Fawcett's
_Frontiers_.

The standard journals have issued important articles by Hinks, Lyde,
Newbigin, and others on the rearranged
boundaries of European states, and
among books concerned with the new Europe one may mention J. M. Keynes,
_Economic Consequences of the Peace_; I. Bowman, _The New World_;
M. I. Newbigin, _Aftermath_; and H. J. Fleure,
_The Treaty Settlement in Europe_.

The new _Times Atlas_ is invaluable, and may be supplemented on the
historical side by use of the well-known
historical atlases of F. Schrader, Poole,
Ramsay Muir, Diercke, and others.
Several valuable maps occur only in Vidal
de la Blache, _Atlas général_.



  PRINTED IN ENGLAND
  AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS




[Illustration: Rear end paper]