The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Peoples of Europe, by Herbert John Fleure

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

6

Peoples of Low German and Scandinavian Speech

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'.

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.

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.]

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 .

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