Front matter (continued 2)

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.