FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[1]Reprinted by permission fromThe Journal of Race Development, Vol. III, No. 4.[2]Cf., however, W. Ridgeway, "The Application of Zoölogical Laws to Man,"Report, British Association for Advancement of Science(Dublin), 1908.[3]Cf.Sergi,The Mediterranean Race, ch. xi, xiii.[4]Sergi,Arii e Italici; Keane,Man Past and Present, ch. xii.[5]Cf.W. J. Sollas, "Palaeolithic Races and their Modern Representatives,"Science Progress, vol. iv, 1909-1910.[6]The Races of Mankind; and "Les six races composant la population de l'Europe,"Journal Anth. Inst., 1906.[7]Illustrated by the various pure breeds or "races" of domestic animals.[8]Mr. R. B. Bean's discussion of Deniker's "Six Races,"e.g., goes far to show that such is probably the standing of the blond types, other than the dolicho-blond, among these six races of Europe; although such is not the conclusion to which Mr. Bean comes.Philippine Journal of Science, September, 1909.

[1]Reprinted by permission fromThe Journal of Race Development, Vol. III, No. 4.

[2]Cf., however, W. Ridgeway, "The Application of Zoölogical Laws to Man,"Report, British Association for Advancement of Science(Dublin), 1908.

[3]Cf.Sergi,The Mediterranean Race, ch. xi, xiii.

[4]Sergi,Arii e Italici; Keane,Man Past and Present, ch. xii.

[5]Cf.W. J. Sollas, "Palaeolithic Races and their Modern Representatives,"Science Progress, vol. iv, 1909-1910.

[6]The Races of Mankind; and "Les six races composant la population de l'Europe,"Journal Anth. Inst., 1906.

[7]Illustrated by the various pure breeds or "races" of domestic animals.

[8]Mr. R. B. Bean's discussion of Deniker's "Six Races,"e.g., goes far to show that such is probably the standing of the blond types, other than the dolicho-blond, among these six races of Europe; although such is not the conclusion to which Mr. Bean comes.Philippine Journal of Science, September, 1909.

It has been argued in an earlier paper[2]that the blond type or types of man (presumably the dolichocephalic blond) arose by mutation from the Mediterranean stock during the last period of severe glaciation in Europe. This would place the emergence of this racial type roughly coincident with the beginning of the European neolithic; the evidence going presumptively to show that the neolithic technology came into Europe with the Mediterranean race, at or about the same time with that race, and that the mutation which gave rise to the dolicho-blond took place after the Mediterranean race was securely settled in Europe. Since this blond mutant made good its survival under the circumstances into which it so was thrown it should presumably be suited by native endowment to the industrial and climatic conditions that prevailed through the early phases of the neolithic age in Europe; that is to say, it would be a type of man selectively adapted to the technological situation characteristic of the early neolithic but lacking as yet the domestic animals (and crop-plants?) that presently give much of its character to that culture.

Beginning, then, with the period of the last severe glaciation, and starting with this technological equipment, those portions of the European population that contained anappreciable and increasing admixture of the blond may be conceived to have ranged across the breadth of Europe, particularly in the lowlands, in the belt of damp and cool country that fringed the ice, and to have followed the receding ice-sheet northward when the general climate of Europe began to take on its present character with the returning warmth and dryness. By force of the strict climatic limitation to which this type is subject, the blond element, and more particularly the dolicho-blond, will presently have disappeared by selective elimination from the population of those regions from which the ice-sheet and its fringe of cool and humid climate had receded. The cool and humid belt suited to the propagation of the blond mutant (and its blond hybrids) would shift northward and shorten down to the seaboard as the glacial conditions in which it had originated presently ceased. So that presently, when Europe finally lost its ice-sheet, the blond race and its characteristic hybrids would be found confined nearly within the bounds which have marked its permanent extension in historic times. These limits have, no doubt, fluctuated somewhat in response to secular variations of climate; but on the whole they appear to have been singularly permanent and singularly rigid.

Apparently after the dolicho-blond had come to occupy the restricted habitat which the stock has since continued to hold on the northern seaboard of Europe, toward the close of what is known in Danish chronology as the "older stone age," the early stock of domestic animals appear to have been introduced into Europe from Asia; the like statement will hold more doubtfully for the older staple crop plants, with the reservation that their introduction appears to antedate that of the domestic animals. At least some such date seems indicated by their first appearance in Denmark late in the period of the "kitchen middens." Virtually all of these essential elements of their material civilisation appear to have come to the blond-hybrid communities settled on the narrow Scandinavian waters, as to the rest of Europe, from Turkestan. This holds true at least for the domestic animals as a whole, the possible exceptions among the early introductions being not of great importance. Some of the early crop plants may well have come from what is now Mesopotamian or Persian territory, and may conceivably have reached western Europe appreciably earlier, without affecting the present argument. If the European horse had been domesticated in palæolithic times, as appears at least extremely probable, that technological gain appears to have been lost before the close of the palæolithic age; perhaps along with the extinction of the European horse.

These new elements of technological equipment, the crop plants and animals, greatly affected the character of the neolithic culture in Europe; visibly so as regards the region presumably occupied by the dolicho-blond,—or the blond-hybrid peoples. On the material side of the community's life they would bring change direct and immediate, altering the whole scheme of ways and means and shifting the pursuit of a livelihood to new lines; and on the immaterial side their effect would be scarcely less important, in that the new ways and means and the new manner of life requisite and induced by their use would bring on certain new institutional features suitable to a system of mixed farming. Whatever may have been the manner of their introduction, whether they were transmitted peaceably by insensible diffusion from group to group or were carried in with a high hand by a new intrusive population that overran the country and imposed its own cultural scheme upon the Europeans along withthe new ways and means of life,—in any case these new cultural elements will have spread over the face of Europe somewhat gradually and will have reached the blond-hybrid communities in their remote corner of the continent only after an appreciable lapse of time. Yet, it is to be noted, it is after all relatively early in neolithic times that certain of the domestic plants and animals first come into evidence in the Scandinavian region.

The crop plants appear to have come in earlier than the domestic animals, being perhaps brought in by the peoples of the Mediterranean race at their first occupation of Europe in late quaternary time. With tillage necessarily goes a sedentary manner of life. So that at their first introduction the domestic animals were intruded into a system of husbandry carried on by a population living in settled communities, and drawing their livelihood in great part from the tilled ground but also in part from the sea and from the game-bearing forests that covered much of the country at that time. It was into such a situation that the domestic animals were intruded on their first coming into Europe,—particularly into the seaboard region of north Europe.

On the open ranges of western and central Asia, from which these domestic animals came, and even in the hill country of that general region, the peoples that draw their livelihood from cattle and sheep are commonly of a nomadic habit of life, in the sense that the requirements of forage for their herds and flocks hold them to an unremitting round of seasonal migration. It results that, except in the broken hill country, these peoples habitually make use of movable habitations, live in camps rather than in settled, sedentary communities. Certain peculiar institutional arrangements also result from this nomadic manner of life associated with the care of flocks and herdson a large scale. But on their introduction into Europe the domestic animals appear on the whole not to have supplanted tillage and given rise to such a nomadic-pastoral scheme of life, exclusively given to cattle raising, but rather to have fallen into a system of mixed farming which combined tillage with a sedentary or quasi-sedentary grazing industry. Such particularly appears to have been the case in the seaboard region of the north, where there is no evidence of tillage having been displaced by a nomadic grazing industry. Indeed, the small-scale and broken topography of this European region has never admitted a large-scale cattle industry, such as has prevailed on the wide Asiatic ranges. An exception, at least partial and circumscribed, may perhaps be found in the large plains of the extreme Southeast and in the Danube valley; and it appears also that grazing, after the sedentary fashion, took precedence of tillage in prehistoric Ireland as well as here and there in the hilly countries of southern and central Europe.

Such an introduction of tillage and grazing would mean a revolutionary change in the technology of the European stone age, and a technological revolution of this kind will unavoidably bring on something of a radical change in the scheme of institutions under which the community lives; primarily in the institutions governing the details of its economic life, but secondarily also in its domestic and civil relations. When such a change comes about through the intrusion of new material factors the presumption should be that the range of institutions already associated with these material factors in their earlier home will greatly influence the resulting new growth of institutions in the new situation, even if circumstances may not permit these alien institutions to be brought in and put into effect with the scope and force which they may have had in theculture out of which they have come. Some assimilation is to be looked for even if circumstances will not permit the adoption of the full scheme of institutions, and the institutions originally associated with the intrusive technology will be found surviving with least loss or qualification in those portions of the invaded territory where the invaders have settled in force, and particularly where conditions have permitted them to retain something of their earlier manner of life.

The bringers of these new elements of culture, material and immaterial, had acquired what they brought with them on the open sheep and cattle ranges of the central-Asiatic plains and uplands,—as is held to be the unequivocal testimony of the Aryan speech, and as is borne out by the latest explorations in that region. These later explorations indicate west-central Turkestan as the probable center of the domestication and diffusion of the animals, if not also of the crop plants, that have stocked Europe. Of what race these bearers of the new technology and culture may have been, and just what they brought into Europe, is all a matter of inference and surmise. It was once usual to infer, as a ready matter of course, that these immigrant pastoral nomads from the Asiatic uplands were "Aryans," "Indo-Europeans," "Indo-Germans," of a predominantly blond physique. But what has been said above as well as in the earlier paper referred to comes near excluding the possibility of these invaders being blonds, or more specifically the dolicho-blond. It is, of course, conceivable, with Keane (if his speculations on this head are to be taken seriously), that a fragment of the alleged blond race from Mauretania may have wandered off into Turkestan by way of the Levant, and so may there have acquired the habits of a pastoral life, together with the Aryan speech and institutions, and maythen presently have carried these cultural factors into Europe and imposed them on the European population, blond and brunet. But such speculations, which once were allowable though idle, have latterly been put out of all question, at least for the present, by the recent Pumpelly explorations in Turkestan. It is, for climatic reasons, extremely improbable that any blond stock should have inhabited any region of the central-Asiatic plains or uplands long enough to acquire the pastoral habits of life and the concomitant Aryan speech and institutions, and it is fairly certain that the dolicho-blond could not have survived for that length of time under the requisite conditions of climate and topography.

It is similarly quite out of the question that the dolicho-blond, arising as a mutant type late in quaternary time, should have created the Aryan speech and culture in Europe, since neither the archæological evidence nor the known facts of climate and topography permit the hypothesis that a pastoral-nomadic culture of home growth has ever prevailed in Europe on a scale approaching that required for such a result. And there is but little more possibility that the bringers of the new (Aryan) culture should have been of the Mediterranean race; although the explorations referred to make it nearly certain that the communities which domesticated the pastoral animals (and perhaps the crop-plants) in Turkestan were of that race. The Mediterranean race originally is Hamitic, not Aryan, it is held by men competent to speak on that matter, and the known (presumably) Mediterranean prehistoric settlements in Turkestan, at Anau, are moreover obviously the settlements of a notably sedentary people following a characteristically peaceable mode of life. The population of these settlements might of course conceivably have presently acquired the nomadic and predatory habits reflected by the Aryan speech and institutions, but there is no evidence of such an episode at Anau, where the finds show an uninterrupted peaceable and sedentary occupation of the sites throughout the period that could come in question. The population of the settlements at Anau could scarcely have made such a cultural innovation, involving the adoption of an alien language, except under the pressure of conquest by an invading people; which would involve the subjection of the peaceable communities of Anau and the incorporation of their inhabitants as slaves or as a servile class in the predatory organisation of their masters. The Mediterranean people of Anau could accordingly have had a hand in carrying this pastoral-predatory (Aryan) culture into the West only as a subsidiary racial element in a migratory community made up primarily of another racial stock.

This leaves the probability that an Asiatic stock, without previous settled sedentary habits of life, acquired the domesticated animals from the sedentary and peaceable communities of Anau, or from some similar village (pueblo) or villages of western Turkestan, and then through a (moderately) long experience of nomadic pastoral life acquired also the predatory habits and institutions that commonly go with a pastoral life on a large scale. These cultural traits they acquired in such a degree of elaboration and maturity as is implied by the primitive Aryan (or, better, proto-Aryan) speech, including a more or less well developed patriarchal system; so that they would presently become a militant and migratory community somewhat after the later-known Tatar fashion, and so made their way westward as a self-sufficient migratory host and carried the new material culture into Europe together with the alien Aryan speech. It is at the same time almost unavoidable that in such anevent this migratory host would have carried with them into the West an appreciable servile contingent made up primarily of enslaved captives from the peaceable agricultural settlements of the Mediterranean race, which had originally supplied them with their stock of domestic animals.

Along with these new technological elements and the changes of law and custom which their adoption would bring on, there will also have come in the new language that was designed to describe these new ways and means of life and was adapted to express the habits of thought which the new ways and means bred in the peoples that adopted them. The immigrant pastoral (proto-Aryan) language and the pastoral (patriarchal and predatory) law and custom will in some degree have been bound up with the technological ways and means out of which they arose, and they would be expected to have reached and affected the various communities of Europe in somewhat the same time and the same measure in which these material facts of the pastoral life made their way among these peoples. In the course of the diffusion of these cultural elements, material and immaterial, among the European communities the language and in a less degree the domestic and civil usages and ideals bred by the habits of the pastoral life might of course come to be dissociated from their material or technological basis and might so be adopted by remoter peoples who never acquired any large measure of the material culture of those pastoral nomads whose manner of life had once given rise to these immaterial features of Aryan civilisation.

Certain considerations going to support this far-flung line of conjectural history may be set out more in detail: (a) The Aryan civilisation is of the pastoral type, withsuch institutions, usages and preconceptions as a large-scale pastoral organisation commonly involves. Such is said by competent philologists to be the evidence of the primitive Aryan speech. It is substantially a servile organisation under patriarchal rule, or, if the expression be preferred, a militant or predatory organisation; these alternative phrases describe the same facts from different points of view. It is characterised by a well-defined system of property rights, a somewhat pronounced subjection of women and children, and a masterful religious system tending strongly to monotheism. A pastoral culture on the broad plains and uplands of a continental region, such as west-central Asia, will necessarily fall into some such shape, because of the necessity of an alert and mobile readiness for offense and defense and the consequent need of soldierly discipline. Insubordination, which is the substance of free institutions, is incompatible with a prosperous pastoral-nomadic mode of life. When worked out with any degree of maturity and consistency the pastoral-nomadic culture that has to do with sheep and cattle appears always to have been a predatory, and therefore a servile culture, particularly when drawn on the large scale imposed by the topography of the central-Asiatic plains, and reënforced with the use of the horse. (The reindeer nomads of the arctic seaboard may appear to be an exception, at least in a degree, but they are a special case, admitting a particular explanation, and their case does not affect the argument for the Aryan civilisation.) The characteristic and pervasive human relation in such a culture is that of master and servant, and the social (domestic and civil) structure is an organisation of graded servitude, in which no one is his own master but the overlord, even nominally. The family is patriarchal, women and children are in strict tutelage, and discretionvests in the male head alone. If the group grows large its civil institutions are of a like coercive character, it commonly shows a rigorous tribal organisation, and in the end, with the help of warlike experience, it almost unavoidably becomes a despotic monarchy.

It has not been unusual to speak of the popular institutions of Germanic paganism—typified,e.g., by the Scandinavian usages of local self-government in pagan times—as being typically Aryan institutions, but that is a misnomer due to uncritical generalisation guided by a chauvinistic bias. These ancient north-European usages are plainly alien to the culture reflected by the primitive Aryan Speech, if we are to accept the consensus of the philological ethnologists to the effect that the people who used the primitive Aryan speech must have been a community of pastoral nomads inhabiting the plains and uplands of a continental region. That many of these philological ethnologists also hold to the view that these Aryans were north-European pagan blonds may raise a personal question of consistency but does not otherwise touch the present argument.

(b) A racial stock that has ever been of first-rate consequence in the ethnology of Europe (the Alpine, brachycephalic brunet, thehomo alpinusof the Linnean scheme) comes into Europe at this general period, from Asia; and this race is held to have presently made itself at home, if not dominant, throughout middle Europe, where it has in historic times unquestionably been the dominant racial element.

(c) The pastoral-nomadic institutions spoken of above appear to have best made their way in those regions of Europe where this brachycephalic brunet stock has been present in some force if not as a dominant racial factor. The evidence is perhaps not conclusive, but there is atleast a strong line of suggestion afforded by the distribution of the patriarchal type of institutions within Europe, including the tribal and gentile organisation. There is a rough concomitance between the distribution of these cultural elements presumably derived from an Aryan source on the one hand, and the distribution past or present of the brachycephalic brunet type on the other hand. The regions where this line of institutions are known to have prevailed in early times are, in the main, regions in which the Alpine racial type is also known to have been present in force, as,e.g., in the classic Greek and Roman republics.

At the same time a gentile organisation seems also to have been associated from the outset with the Mediterranean racial stock and may well have been comprised in the institutional furniture of that race as it stood before the advent of the Alpine stock; but the drift of later inquiry and speculation on this head appears to support the view that this Mediterranean gentile system was of a matrilinear character, such as is found in many extant agricultural communities of the lower barbarian culture, rather than of a patriarchal kind, such as characterises the pastoral nomads. The northern blond communities alone appear, on the available evidence, to have had no gentile or tribal institutions, whether matrilinear or patriarchal. The classic Greek and Roman communities appear originally to have been of the Mediterranean race and to have always retained a broad substratum of the Mediterranean stock as the largest racial element in their population, but the Alpine stock was also largely represented in these communities at the period when their tribal and gentile institutions are known to have counted for much, as, indeed, it has continued ever since.

Apart from these communities of the Mediterranean seaboard, the peoples of the Keltic culture appear to havehad the tribal and gentile system, together with the patriarchal family, in more fully developed form than it is to be found in Europe at large. The peoples of Keltic speech are currently believed by ethnologists to have originally been of a blond type, although opinions are not altogether at one on that head,—the tall, perhaps red-haired, brachycephalic blond, the "Saxon" of Beddoe, the "Oriental" of Deniker. But this blond type is perhaps best accounted for as a hybrid of the dolicho-blond crossed on the Alpine brachycephalic brunet. Some such view of its derivation is fortified by what is known of the prehistory and the peculiar features of the early Keltic culture. This culture differs in some respects radically from that of the dolicho-blond communities, and it bears more of a resemblance to the culture of such a brunet group of peoples as the early historic communities of upper and middle Italy. If the view is to be accepted which is coming into currency latterly, that the Keltic is to be affiliated with the culture of Hallstatt and La Tène, such affiliation will greatly increase the probability that it is to be counted as a culture strongly influenced if not dominated by the Alpine stock. The Hallstatt culture, lying in the valley of the Danube and its upper affluents, lay in the presumed westward path of immigration of the Alpine stock; its human remains are of a mixed character, showing a strong admixture of the brachycephalic brunet type; and it gives evidence of cultural gains due to outside influence in advance of the adjacent regions of Europe. This Keltic culture, then, as known to history and prehistory, runs broadly across middle Europe along the belt where blond and brunet elements meet and blend; and it has some of the features of that predatory-pastoral culture reflected by the primitive Aryan speech, in freer development, or in better preservation, than the adjacent cultural regionsto the north; at the same time the peoples of this Keltic culture show more of affiliation to or admixture with the brachycephalic brunet than the other blond-hybrid peoples do.

On the other hand the communities of dolicho-blond hybrids on the shores of the narrow Scandinavian waters, remote from the centers of the Alpine culture, show little of the institutions peculiar to a pastoral people. These dolicho-blond hybrids of the North come into history at a later date, but with a better preserved and more adequately recorded paganism than the other barbarians of Europe. The late-pagan Germanic-Scandinavian culture affords the best available instance of archaic dolicho-blond institutions, if not the sole instance; and it is to be noted that among these peoples the patriarchal system is weak and vague,—women are not in perpetual tutelage, the discretion of the male head of the household is not despotic nor even unquestioned, children are not held under paternal discretion beyond adult age, the patrimony is held to no clan liabilities and is readily divisible on inheritance, and so forth. Neither is there any serious evidence of a tribal or gentile system among these peoples, early or late, nor are any of them, excepting the late and special instance of the Icelandic colony, known ever to have been wholly or mainly of pastoral habits; indeed, they are known to have been without the pastoral animals until some time in the neolithic period. The only dissenting evidence on these heads is that of the Latin writers, substantially Cæsar and Tacitus, whose testimony is doubtless to be thrown out as incompetent in view of the fact that it is supported neither by circumstantial evidence nor by later and more authentic records. In speaking of "tribes" among the Germanic hordes these Latin writers are plainly construing Germanic facts in Roman terms,very much as the Spanish writers of a later day construed Mexican and Peruvian facts in mediæval-feudalistic terms,—to the lasting confusion of the historians; whereas in enlarging on the pastoral habits of the Germanic communities they go entirely on data taken from bodies of people on the move and organised for raiding, or recently and provisionally settled upon a subject population presumably of Keltic derivation or of other alien origin and inhabiting the broad lands of middle Europe remote from the permanent habitat of the dolicho-blond. Great freedom of assumption has been used and much ingenuity has been spent in imputing a tribal system to the early Germanic peoples, but apart from the sophisticated testimony of these classical writers there is no evidence for it. The nearest approach to a tribal or a gentile organisation within this culture is the "kin" which counts for something in early Germanic law and custom; but the kin is far from being a gens or clan, and it will be found to have more of the force of a clan organisation the farther it has strayed from the Scandinavian center of diffusion of the dolicho-blond and the more protracted the warlike discipline to which the wandering host has been exposed. All these properly Aryan institutions are weakest or most notably wanting where the blond is most indubitably in evidence.

Taking early Europe as a whole, it will appear that among the European peoples at large institutions of the character reflected in the primitive Aryan speech and implied in the pastoral-nomadic life evidenced by the same speech are relatively weak, ill-defined or wanting, arguing that Europe was never fully Aryanised. And the peculiar geographical and ethnic distribution of this Aryanism of institutions argues further that the dolicho-blond culture of the Scandinavian region was less profoundly affectedby the Aryan invasion than any other equally well known section of Europe. What is known of this primitive Aryan culture, material, domestic, civil and religious, through the Sanskrit and other early Asiatic sources, may convincingly be contrasted with what is found in early Europe. These Asiatic records, which are our sole dependence for a competent characterisation of the Aryan culture, shows it to have resembled the culture of the early Hebrews or that of the pastoral Turanians more closely than it resembles the early European culture at large, and greatly more than it resembles the known culture of the early communities of dolicho-blond hybrids.

(d) Scarcely more conclusive, but equally suggestive, is the evidence from the religious institutions of the Aryanised Europeans. As would be expected in any predatory civilisation, such as the pastoral-nomadic cultures typically are, the Aryan religious system is said to have leaned strongly toward a despotic monarchical form, a hierarchically graded polytheism, culminating in a despotic monotheism. There is little of all this to be found in early pagan Europe. The nearest well-known approach to anything of the kind is the late-Greek scheme of Olympian divinities with Zeus as a doubtful suzerain,—known through latter-day investigations to have been superimposed on an earlier cult of a very different character. The Keltic (Druidical) system is little known, but it is perhaps not beyond legitimate conjecture, on the scant evidence available, that this system had rather more of the predatory, monarchical-despotic cast than the better known pagan cults of Europe. The Germanic paganism, as indicated by the late Scandinavian—which alone is known in any appreciable degree—was a lax polytheism which imputed little if any coercive power to the highest god, and which was not taken so very seriously anywayby the "worshipers,"—if Snorri's virtually exclusive account is to be accepted without sophistication. The evidence accorded by the religious cults of Europe yields little that is conclusive, beyond throwing the whole loose-jointed, proliferous European paganism out of touch with anything that can reasonably be called Aryan. And this in spite of the fact that all the available evidence is derived from the European cults as they stood after having been exposed to long centuries of Aryanisation. So that it may well be held that such systematisation of myths and observances as these European cults give evidence of, and going in the direction of a despotic monotheism, is to be traced to the influence of the intrusive culture of the Aryan or Aryanised invaders,—as is fairly plain in the instance of the Olympians.

(e) That the languages of early Europe, so far as known, belong almost universally to the Aryan family may seem an insurmountable obstacle to the view here spoken for. But the difficulties of the case are not appreciably lessened by so varying the hypothesis as to impute the Aryan speech to the dolicho-blond, or to any blond stock, as its original bearer. Indeed, the difficulties are increased by such an hypothesis, since the Aryan-speaking peoples of early times, as of later times, have in the main been communities made up of brunets without evidence of a blond admixture, not to speak of an exclusively blond people. (There is no evidence of the existence of an all-blond people anywhere, early or late.)

The early European situation, so far as known, offers no exceptional obstacles to the diffusion of an intrusive language. Certain mass movements of population, or rather mass movements of communities shifting their ground by secular progression, are known to have taken place, as,e.g., in the case of the Hallstatt-La Tène-Kelticculture moving westward on the whole as it gained ground and spread by shifting and ramification outward from its first-known seat in the upper Danube valley. All the while, as this secular movement of growth, ramification and advance was going on, the Hallstatt-La Tène-Keltic peoples continued to maintain extensive trade relations with the Mediterranean seaboard and the Ægean on the one side and reaching the North-Sea littoral on the other side. In all probability it is by trade relations of this kind—chiefly, no doubt, through trade carried on by itinerant merchants—that the new speech made its way among the barbarians of Europe; and it is no far-fetched inference that it made its way, in the North at least, as a trade jargon. All this accords with what is going on at present under analogous circumstances. The superior merit by force of which such a new speech would make its way need be nothing more substantial than a relatively crude syntax and phonetics—such as furthers the dissemination of English to-day in the form of Chinook jargon, Pidgin English, and Beach la Mar. Such traits, which might in some other light seem blemishes, facilitate the mutilation of such a language into a graceless but practicable trade jargon. With jargons as with coins the poorer (simpler) drives out the better (subtler and more complex). A second, and perhaps the chief, point of superiority by virtue of which a given language makes its way as the dominant factor in such a trade jargon, is the fact that it is the native language of the people who carry on the trade for whose behoof the jargon is contrived. The traders, coming in contact with many men, of varied speech, and carrying their varied stock of trade goods, will impose their own names for the articles bartered and so contribute that much to the jargon vocabulary,—and a jargon is at its inception little more than a vocabulary.The traders at the same time are likely to belong to the people possessed of the more efficient technology, since it is the superior technology that commonly affords them their opportunity for advantageous trade; hence the new or intrusive words, being the names of new or intrusive facts, will in so far find their way unhindered into current speech and further the displacement of the indigenous language by the jargon.

Such a jargon at the outset is little else than a vocabulary comprising names for the most common objects and the most tangible relations. On this simple but practicable framework new varieties of speech will develop, diversified locally according to the kind and quantity of materials and linguistic tradition contributed by the various languages which it supplants or absorbs.

In so putting forward the conjecture that the several forms of Aryan speech have arisen out of trade jargons that have run back to a common source in the language of an intrusive proto-Aryan people, and developing into widely diversified local and ethnic variants according as the mutilated proto-Aryan speech (vocabulary) fell into the hands of one or another of the indigenous barbarian peoples,—in this suggestion there is after all nothing substantially novel beyond giving a collective name to facts already well accepted by the philologists. Working backward analytically step by step from the mature results given in the known Aryan languages they have discovered and divulged—with what prolixity need not be alluded to here—that in their beginnings these several idioms were little else than crude vocabularies covering the commonest objects and most tangible relations, and that by time-long use and wont the uncouth strings of vocables whereby the beginners of these languages sought to express themselves have been worked down through astupendously elaborate fabric of prefixes, infixes and suffixes, etc., etc., to the tactically and phonetically unexceptionable inflected languages of the Aryan family as they stood at their classical best. And what is true of the European languages should apparently hold with but slight modification for the Asiatic members of the family. These European idioms are commonly said to be, on the whole, less true to the pattern of the inferentially known primitive Aryan than are its best Asiatic representatives; as would be expected in case the latter were an outgrowth of jargons lying nearer the center of diffusion of the proto-Aryan speech and technology.

As regards the special case of the early north-European communities of dolicho-blond hybrids, the trade between the Baltic and Danish waters on the one hand and the Danube valley, Adriatic and Ægean on the other hand is known to have been continued and voluminous during the neolithic and bronze ages,—as counted by the Scandinavian chronology. In the course of this traffic, extending over many centuries and complicated as it seems to have been with a large infiltration of the brachycephalic brunet type, much might come to pass in the way of linguistic substitution and growth.

FOOTNOTES:[1]Reprinted by permission fromThe University of Missouri Bulletin, Science Series, vol. ii, No. 3.[2]"The Mutation Theory and the Blond Race," inThe Journal of Race Development, April, 1913.

[1]Reprinted by permission fromThe University of Missouri Bulletin, Science Series, vol. ii, No. 3.

[2]"The Mutation Theory and the Blond Race," inThe Journal of Race Development, April, 1913.

According to Much,[2]following in the main the views of Penka, Wilser, De Lapouge, Sophus Müller, Andreas Hansen, and other spokesmen of the later theories touching Aryan origins, the area of characterisation of the West-European culture, as well as of that dolicho-blond racial stock that bears this culture, is the region bordering on the North Sea and the Baltic, and its center of diffusion is to be sought on the southern shores of the Baltic. This region is in a manner, then, the primary focus of that culture of enterprise that has reshaped the scheme of life for mankind during the Christian era. Its spirit of enterprise and adventure has carried this race to a degree of material success that is without example in history, whether in point of the extent or of the scope of its achievements. Up to the present the culminating achievement of this enterprise is dominion in business, and its most finished instrument is the quasi-voluntary coalition of forces known as a Trust.

In its method and outward form this enterprise of the Indo-germanic racial stock has varied with the passage of time and the change of circumstances; but in its spirit and objective end it has maintained a singularly consistent character through all the mutations of name and external circumstance that have passed over it in the course of history.

In its earlier, more elemental expression this enterprisetakes the form of raiding, by land and sea. A shrewd interpretation might, without particular violence to the facts, find a coalition of forces of the kind which is later known as a Trust in the Barbarian raids spoken of as theVölkerwanderung. Such an interpretation would seem remote, however, and not particularly apt. The beginnings of abona fidetrust enterprise are of a more businesslike character and have left a record more amenable to the tests of accountancy. A trust, as that term is colloquially understood, is a business organisation.

Now, the line of enterprise, of indigenous growth in the north-European cultural region, which first falls into settled shape as an orderly, organised business is the traffic of those seafaring men of the North known to fame as the Vikings. And it is in this traffic, so far as the records show, that a trust, with all essential features, is first organised. The term "viking" covers, somewhat euphemistically, two main facts: piracy and slave-trade. Without both of these lines of business the traffic could not be maintained in the long run; and both, but more particularly the latter, presume, as an indispensable condition to their successful prosecution, a regular market and an assured demand for the output. It is a traffic in which, in order to get the best results, a relatively large initial investment must be sunk, and the period of turnover—the "period of production"—is necessarily of some duration; the risk is also considerable. Further, certain technological prerequisites must be met, in the way particularly of shipbuilding, navigation, and the manufacture of weapons; an adequate accumulation of capital goods must be had, coupled with a sagacious spirit of adventure; there must also be an available supply of labor. There appears to have been a concurrence of all these circumstances, together with favorable market conditions, in the south-Baltic region from about the sixth century onward; the circumstances apparently growing gradually more favorable through the succeeding four centuries.

The viking trade appears to have grown up gradually on the Baltic seaboard, as well as in the Sound country and throughout the fjord region of Norway, as a by-occupation of the farming population. Its beginnings are earlier than any records, so that the earliest traditions speak of it as an institution well understood and fully legitimate. The well-to-do freehold farmers, including some who laid claim to the rank ofjarl, seem to have found it an agreeable and honorable diversion, as well as a lucrative employment for their surplus wealth and labor supply. From such sporadic and occasional beginnings it passed presently into an independently organised and self-sustaining line of business enterprise, and in the course of time it attained a settled business routine and a defined code of professional ethics. Syndication, of a loose form, had begun as early as the oldest accounts extant, but it is evident from the way in which the matter is spoken of that combination had not at that date—say, about the beginning of the ninth century—long been the common practice. It was not then a matter of course. The early combinations were relatively small and transient. They took the form of "gentlemen's agreements," pools, working arrangements, division of territory, etc., rather than hard and fast syndicates. In those early days a combine would be formed for a season between two or more capitalist-undertakers, for the most part employing their own capital only, without recourse to credit; although credit arrangements occur quite early, but are not very common in the earlier recorded phases of the trade. Such a loose combine, sayabout the middle of the ninth century, might comprise from two to a dozen boats. What may be called the normal unit in the trade at that time was a boat of perhaps thirty tons' burden, with an effective crew of some eighty men. Boats and crews gradually increase both in size and efficiency for a century and a half after that time.

Syndication, of an increasingly close texture and increasingly permanent effect, appears to have rapidly grown in favor through the ninth and tenth centuries. The reasons for this movement of coalition are plain. The volume of the trade, as well as its territorial extension, increased uninterruptedly. The technique of the trade was gradually improved, and the equipment and management were improved and reduced to standard forms. The tonnage employed at any given time can, of course, not be ascertained with anything like a confident approximation; but its steady increase is unmistakable. Year by year the boats and crews increase in average size as well as in number, until by the middle of the tenth century the number of men and ships engaged, as well as the volume of capital invested in the trade, are probably larger than the corresponding figures for any other form of lucrative enterprise at that time. It is, at that time, altogether the best-organised line of enterprise in the West-European region in respect of its business management, and the most efficient and progressive in respect of its equipment and technology. At a conservative guess, the aggregate number of ships engaged about the middle of the tenth century must have appreciably exceeded six hundred, and may have reached one thousand; with crews which had also grown gradually larger until they may by this time have averaged 150 or 200 men. There was consequently what would inmodern phrase be called an "overproduction" of piratical craft—overinvestment in the viking trade and consequent cut-throat competition. The various coalitions came into violent conflict, and many of them went under, with great resultant loss of capital, impoverishment of well-to-do families, hardship and demoralisation of the entire trade.

Added to these untoward conditions within the trade was the open disfavor of the crown, in each of the three Scandinavian kingdoms. The traffic had long passed out of the stage at which it had offered a lucrative opening for farmers' sons who were tired of the farm and eager to find excitement, reputation, and creature comforts in that wider human contact and busier life for which the tedium of the farm had sharpened their appetites. The larger capitalists alone could succeed as organisers or directors of a viking concern under the changed conditions. The common run of well-to-do farmers had neither the tangible assets nor the "good-will" requisite to the successful promotion of a new company of freebooters. At the best, their sons could enter the business only as employees and with but a very uncertain outlook to speedy promotion to an executive position. On the other hand, as the trade became better organised in stronger hands, with a larger equipment, and as the competition within the trade grew more severe, the blackmail from which much of the profits of the trade was drawn grew more excessive and more uncertain, both as to its amount and as to the manner and incidents with which it was levied. As competition grew severe and the small vikings practically disappeared, and as the demoralisation that goes with cut-throat competition set in, the livelihood of the common people, at whose expense the vikings lived, grew progressively more precarious, andeven their domestic peace and household industry grew insecure. Popular sentiment was running strongly against the whole traffic. So much so, indeed, as to threaten the tenure of courts and sovereigns if the popular hardship incident to the continuance of the trade were not abated.

The politicians, therefore, made a strenuous show of effort to regulate, or even to repress, the viking organisations. Outright and indiscriminate repression was scarcely a feasible remedy, certainly not an agreeable one. The viking companies were a source of strength to the country, both in that they might be drawn on for support in case of war and in that they brought funds into the country. The remedy to which the politicians turned, by preference, therefore, was a regulation of the companies in such a manner as to let "the foreigners pay the tax," to adapt a modern phrase. If the freebooters of a given state could be induced, by stringent regulations, to prey upon the people of the neighboring states, and particularly if they worked at cross-purposes with similar companies of freebooters domiciled in such neighboring states, it was then plain to the sagacious politicians of those days that the companies might be more of a blessing than a curse. On trial it was found that this policy of control gave at the best but very dubious results, and consequently the repressive hand of the authorities perforce fell with increasingly rigorous pressure on the viking organisations, particularly on the smaller ones which were scarcely of national importance. The competition in the trade was too severe to admit of a consistent avoidance of excesses and irregularities on the part of the vikings, and these irregularities obliged the authorities to interfere.

Under these circumstances it is plain that no vikingcombine could hope to prosper in the long run unless it were strong enough to take an international position and to maintain a practical monopoly of the trade. "International" in these premises means within the Scandinavian countries. In the days of its finest development the viking trade was domiciled in the Scandinavian countries, almost exclusively. This means the two Scandinavian peninsulas, with Iceland, the Faroes, Orkneys, Hebrides, and the Scandinavian portions of Scotland. To this, for completeness of statement, is to be added a stretch of Wendish seaboard on the south of the Baltic and a negligible patch of German territory. The trade, so far as regards its home offices, to use a modern phrase, gathered in the main about two chief centers: the Orkneys and the south end of the Baltic. Outlying regions, such as the Norwegian fjord country and the Hebrides, are by no means negligible, but the two regions named above are after all the chief seats of the traffic; and of these two centers the Baltic—chiefly Danish—region is in many respects the more notable. Its viking traffic is better, more regularly organised, is carried on with a more evident sense of a solidarity of interests and a more consistent view to a long-term prosperity. As one might say, looking at the matter from the modern standpoint, it has more of a look of stability and conservative management, such as belongs to an investment business, and has less of a speculative air, than the trade that centers in the western isles.

Perhaps it is just on this account, because of its greater stability of interests and more conservative animus, that the traffic of this region responds with greater alacrity to the pressure of excessive competition and political interference, and so enters on a policy of larger and closer coalition. It may be added that many of the greatcaptains of adventure in this region are men of good family and substantial standing in the community. As may often happen in a like conjuncture, when the irksomeness of this competitive situation in the Baltic was fast becoming intolerable, there arose a man of far-seeing sagacity and settled principles, of executive ability and businesslike integrity, who saw the needs of the hour and the available remedy, and who saw at the same glance his own opportunity of gain. This man was Pálnatoki, the descendant of an honorable line of country gentlemen in the island of Funen, whose family had from time immemorial borne an active and prudent part in the trade, and had been well seen at court and in society. He was a man of mature experience, with a large investment in the traffic, and with a body of "good-will" that gave him perhaps his most decisive advantage.

During the reign of Harald Gormsson, about the middle of the tenth century, Pálnatoki seems to have cast about for a basis on which to promote an international coalition of vikings, such as would put an end to headlong competition in the trade and would at the same time be placed above the accidents of national politics. To this end it was necessary to find a neutral ground on which to establish the home office of the concern. Such a mediæval-Scandinavian New Jersey was the Wendish kingdom at the south of the Baltic.

Jómsborg (on the island of Wollin, at the mouth of the Oder) seems to have been a resort of vikings before Pálnatoki organised his company there and strengthened the harbor, which may have been fortified by those who held it before him. Here the new company was incorporated under a special franchise from the Wendish crown, with the stipulation that it was to do business only outside the Wendish territories. The tangible assets ofthe corporation were the harbor and fortified town of Jómsborg, together with the ships and other equipment of such vikings as were admitted to fellowship; its intangible assets were its franchise and the good-will of the promoter and the underlying companies. Its by-laws were very strict, both as to the discipline of the personnel and as to the distribution of earnings. The promoter, who was the first president of the corporation, was given extreme powers for the enforcement of the by-laws, and throughout his long incumbency of office he exercised his powers with the greatest discretion and with a most salutary effect.

This neutral, international corporation of piracy rapidly won a great prestige. In modern phrase, its intangible assets grew rapidly larger. Backed by the competitive pressure which the new corporation was able to bring upon the smaller companies and syndicates, this prestige of the Jómsvikings brought a steady run of applications for admission into the trust. The trust's policy was substantially the same as has since become familiar in other lines of enterprise, with the difference that in those early days the competitive struggle took a less sophisticated form. Outstanding syndicates and private firms were given the alternative of submission to the trust's terms or retirement from the traffic. There was great hardship among the outstanding concerns, especially among that large proportion of them that were unable to meet the scale of requirements imposed on applicants for admission into the trust. The qualifications both as to equipment and personnel were extremely strict, so that a large percentage of the applicants were excluded; and the unfortunates who failed of admission found themselves in a doubtful position that grew more precarious with every year that passed. Practically, suchconcerns were either frozen out of the business or forced into a liquidation which permanently wound up their affairs and terminated their corporate existence.

The accounts extant are of course not reliable in minute details, being not strictly contemporary, nor are they cast in such modern terms as would give an easy comparison with present-day facts. The chief documents in the case areJómsvikingasaga,Saxo Grammaticus,Heimskringla, andOlafssaga Tryggvasonar; but nearly the whole of the saga literature bears on the development of the viking trade, and characteristic references to the Jómsviking trust occur throughout. The evidence afforded by these accounts converges to the conclusion that toward the close of the tenth century the trust stood in a high state of prosperity and was in a position virtually to dictate the course of the traffic for all that portion of the viking trade that centered in the Baltic. Its prestige and influence were strong wherever the traffic extended, even in the region of the western isles and in the fjord country of Norway. It had even come to be a factor of first-rate consequence in international politics, and its power was feared and courted by those two sovereigns who established the Danish rule in England, as well as by their Swedish, Norwegian, and Russian contemporaries. It is probably not an overstatement to say that the Danish conquest of England would not have been practicable except for the alliance of the trust with Svend, which enabled him to turn his attention from the complications of Scandinavian politics to his English interests.

The extent of the trust's material equipment at the height of its prosperity is a matter of surmise rather than of statistical information. Some notion of its strength may be gathered from the statement that the fortified harbor of Jómsborg included within its castellated sea-wall an inclosed basin capable of floating three hundred ships at anchor. In the great raid against the kingdom of Norway, whose failure inaugurated the disintegration of the trust, the number of ships sent out is variously given by different authorities. TheJómsvikingasagasays that they numbered one long hundred. This fleet, however, was made up of craft selected from among the ships that were under the immediate command of four of the great captains of adventure. The fleet, as it lay in the Sound before the final selection, is said to have numbered 185, but the context shows that this fleet was but a fraction of the aggregate Jómsviking tonnage. Of this disastrous expedition but a fraction returned; yet various later expeditions of the Jómsvikings are mentioned in which some scores of their ships took part.

The trust having become an international power, it undertook to shape the destiny of nations and dynasties, and it broke under the strain. It, or its directors, took a contract to bring Norway into subjection to the Danish crown. Partly through untoward accidents, partly through miscalculation and hurried preparations, it failed in this undertaking, which brought the affairs of the trust to a spectacular crisis. From this disaster it never recovered. With the opening of the eleventh century the viking trust fell into abeyance, and in a few years it disappeared from the field. There are several good reasons for its failure. On the death of its founder the management had passed into the hands of Sigvaldi, a man of less sagacity and less integrity as well as of more unprincipled personal ambition, and somewhat given to flighty ventures in the field of politics. It was Sigvaldi's overweening personal ambition that committed the corporation to the ill-advised expedition against Norway. The trust, moreover, being supreme within its field, thediscipline grew lax and its exactions grew arbitrary, sometimes going to unprovoked excesses. As one might say, too little thought was given to "economies of production," and the charges were pushed beyond "what the traffic would bear." But for all that, in spite of its meddling in politics, and in spite of jobbery and corruption in its management, the trust still had a fair outlook for continued success, except that the bottom dropped out of the trade. For better or worse, the slave-trade in the north of Europe collapsed on the introduction of Christianity, at least so far as regards the trade in Christians; and without a slave market the viking enterprise had no chance of reasonable earnings. At the same time, the risk and hardships of the traffic—the "cost of production"—grew heavier as the countries to the south became better able to defend their shores. The passenger traffic failed almost entirely, and the goods traffic was in a disorganised and unprofitable state. The costs were fast becoming prohibitive, even to men so enterprising and necessitous as the Norwegian freebooters. The situation changed in such a way as to leave the trust out.

Some show of corporate existence was still maintained for a short period after the trust's great crisis, but there was an end of discipline and authoritative control. The minor concerns and private establishments that had once formed part of the trust continued in the trade on an independent footing, but with decreasing regularity and with diminishing strength. As the equipment wore out it was not replaced, and the trade lapsed. The great captains of the industry, like Sigvaldi, Thorkel Haraldson, Sigurd Kápa, and Vagn Akason, turned their holdings to the service of the dynastic politics which were then engaging the attention of the northern countries. Much of this body of enterprise and wealth was exhausted in working out the imperialistic schemes of expansion of Svend and Knut the Great; and what was left over shared the fortunes of the other available forces of the Scandinavian countries, being dissipated in political dissensions, extortionate government organisations, and the establishment of a church and a nobility.

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