Without attempting to estimate what was the speech of the early long-headed types of man on the European plain (the almost level belt from Calais via Vilna to the Urals), and without trying to dig back deeply into prehistoric time, it may be stated that in the early days of history the home of the Teutonic family of languages seems to have been on the western portion of the European plain and in the related parts of Scandinavia, no doubt with various Baltic extensions. Of its attempts to spread towards the Paris basin then, as in later times, there is little doubt, but its ultimate extension in this direction has already been discussed. It is most probable that the people who used these languages were mainly Nordic coast-dwellers and occupiers of the wet marsh and moorland country on the west side of the Elbe. In many parts their physique must have been Alpine-Nordic to a large extent.
The area of Teutonic speech historically falls into three: the Scandinavian area including Jutland north of Flensburg, the Low German plains from the Elbe to the mouths of Rhine andMaas, and the Highlands east of the Rhine, into which Teutonic speech spread, and in which it became enriched by mixture with Celtic, and, later on, with Latin and Romance elements, and so became Alemannic, and, ultimately, High German.
In Roman times Teutonic speech was thus most characteristic of the belt outside the Rhine frontier of the Roman Empire, and from this basis we may trace the Teutonic peoples onwards. The forests of Germany were dense and extensive, and apparently in post-Roman times they were being attacked in two ways: the hill people were moving down and making the population more Alpine in physical type and more Alemannic in language, and the Church was founding abbeys and spreading its influence across the Rhine from the erstwhile Roman frontier-cities then becoming cities of the Roman Church in most cases. The wave of Roman civilization interrupted by the barbarian movements was thus resumed under Church leadership, and with it went the growth of towns and of intercourse, after some time making the contrast between south and north in Germany not only a contrast between hills and plains and between High German and Low German, but also a contrast between a much more Romanized and civic south and a much less Romanized and more rural north, though the Church did establish itself in the north in due course.
Alemannic became characteristic of the hill belt next beyond the region of French speech, and there replaced a Brythonic Celtic language. But farther east the languages of the hill people had by this time taken Slavonic form, so that the Alemannic belt was of but moderate width, including the Alps and their northern flanks down to the Prussian plain, but not Bohemia and the Carpathian arc which were of Slavonic speech (p. 61). The downhill movement above mentioned characterized the Slavonic hill lands as well as the Alemannic, so that on the Prussian plain east of the Elbe old languages (probably of Lettic kinship, seep. 18) gave way to Slavonic, and in course of time the Elbe became thefrontier between German and Slavonic, with the Altmark (old frontier territory) to the west of it.
The progress of Germanization eastwards to the Mittelmark, between Elbe and Oder, and the Neu-Mark farther east, towards but not up to the Vistula, must not be interpreted as meaning that these regions were still purely Slavonic in the days of the Elbe frontier. Probably German was already in use here and there, but Germanization and the spread of the Church involved agricultural development and closer settlement, and so changed the character of the country. It was done under German leadership, and brought in German settlers. In the early Middle Ages there was a recession of Slavonic on the Prussian plain, and now only one fully Slavonic region in the German area remains. This is the Wendish area, and the Wends are supposed to have spread down from the hill slopes on the northern frontier of Bohemia. The present area of the Wends is astride the upper Spree, and especially around Kottbus, and the district is called Lusatia, but in the Middle Ages they spread farther north. It is largely Germanized in speech at the present time, but preserves old features and Slav names. Slav place-names are as characteristic on the German plain east of the Elbe as are Celtic names in the non-Celtic speaking part of Scotland, and illustrate a change of language of a people already having some settled organization. This contrasts with the rarity of survival of Celtic town names on the English plain. The changes of language areas since the Middle Ages have probably been quite small. The zone west of the Vistula has remained a zone of admixture of German and Polish-speaking people, whence the 'Polish corridor to Danzig' of the recent treaties, linguistically and traditionally justifiable and yet admitted to be dangerous politically.
The relation of the Teutonic languages of Jutland to one another in origin is beyond our scope, but the dialect of the western side of the base of Jutland has remained fairly distinctas 'Frisian', and has attempted a literary development in the last century. The new treaty boundary between Germany and Denmark gives what was North Slesvig to Denmark, and is intended to run along a line in the linguistic frontier-zone. The Low German speech of the Rhine mouths, with the long isolation of the people of that region and their concentration on the work of fighting the sea, developed into Dutch.
We thus have Dutch, Frisian, Low German, High German or Alemannic, and naturally a Middle German developing between the two latter along the zone where the southern hills grade into the northern plain.
The complex topography of the south German hill country had given rise to an infinite muddle of small states, and at the end of the fifteenth century they agreed, as the people of South France had done centuries before, to 'receive' the Roman Law. This reception was effective over most of the hill country, but not in any considerable part of the plain, a natural consequence of the contrasts already noted, and a further accentuation of them for the succeeding period. In the early sixteenth century came the religious schism, during which the northern plain and the foothill region left the Catholic Church almosten bloc, while the people of the hill and valley country of South Germany remained attached to Rome. This, however, by no means adequately describes the territories of the two ecclesiastical systems, for the Roman influence on the Rhine seems to have kept the Ems region largely Catholic, while Protestantism occupied the south along the Cassel-Frankfort line, and spread through Württemberg and the Nürnberg district. The strongly Catholic regions are the Rhine (except about Mainz), the Ems basin, the upper Main area, focusing on Würzburg and Bamberg, and the upper Danube basin (the chief part of Bavaria proper). The Rhine and Danube, with the Roman frontier towns becoming ecclesiastical cities, stand out remarkably in this connexion.
The contrasts between north and south have been discussed for the Middle Ages, but they have diminished on the whole in later times. Germany's vernacular literature gained its great impetus from Luther's fine translation of the Bible. He used a Saxon dialect of mixed High and Middle German, and, as in other countries affected by the Great Schism, the language of the Bible became the literary and political language to a large extent, thanks in great part to the practice of requiring every confirmand to learn a portion of Scripture in the vernacular, and to the consequent spread of the reading habit and the demand for books. The growth of newspapers, schools, and public discussions has spread this Middle German as the standard speech of the whole country, but Frisian and Alemannic dialects do still survive within the borders of the new German republic.
Intermixture between Nordic and Alpine stocks has spread the dominant broad-headedness of the Alpine over most of what is now Germany, but it is often combined with characters derived from the Nordic side (fair colouring and certain facial features), and a good deal of Nordic physique survives in the north-west and in Württemberg, as well as on the forested Thuringian hills. This spread of broad-headedness may be thought of alongside of the spread of modified High German and of the spread of southern rulers like the Hohenzollerns northwards, and it will then be seen how, in many ways, the south has permeated the north in more modern as well as in more remote times. It is useful to bear these things in mind as an offset against the danger of over-emphasizing the effects of the spread of Prussian political organizations over the south in the nineteenth century; it is also well to remember how much of that organizing power is traceable directly and indirectly to the Huguenot refugees finding homes in the hospitable Brandenburg of the seventeenth century.
If the cathedrals are the sign and token of the people's effort in the Paris basin, the Universities, based upon that of Paris, arethe characteristic feature of civilization in the hill region of Germany, and, if prose is the triumphant expression of the French genius, lyrics and music are the glory of the German. The sharp criticism and startling clarity of French thought, growing where all the racial stocks of Europe jostle one another in a good wine country, stands in unceasing contrast to the more laborious stodginess of the more or less Alpinized German with his heavier menu in both food and drink. The quick enterprising Nordic element is present here and there; but it is the Alpine patience and appetite for detail that has increasingly dominated the psychology of the German people, working out into a power of combination that has had remarkable results in the industrial period.
Just as we have had occasion to trace Romanization in the German belt, so we are able to follow Germanization in the Slavonic belt, but this time with differences. In the first place, there are settlements of Germans in forest clearings, as noted already for the plain east of the Elbe. But for the most part the western zone of the Slavonic belt had been Christianized, in large measure via Bohemia, before efforts at Germanization developed seriously, and so it was the next stage of social development that was affected by the German spread, namely the growth of towns. We thence find some areas of Germanized rural population, but also, through what have become Poland and Transylvania, German groups in the towns, and a similar movement into Russia has been a feature of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The most important area of Germanized people in the Slavonic belt is what is now known as East Prussia, the disconnected province of the German Republic (1919). This is the zone of gradation from the broad-headed people of Central Europe to the long-headed Baltic folk speaking old languages, of which the now extinct Prussian was one, related to Lithuanian. Christianity had spread down the Vistula before the Germanizing process hadgot far across the Oder, so that agricultural organization, fixing the popular language, made the lower Vistula mainly Slavonic on its western side. The next stage of progress of the Roman tradition had now to be across the Vistula into East Prussia, and it took place at the suggestion of the ruler of Danzig and the monks of Oliva near by. It was carried out by the Teutonic Knights, and involved Germanization at least of the formerly Prussian-speaking people near the coast. The Masurians farther inland among their marshes were, and remained, more Slavonic, but felt the Germanizing influence sufficiently to secede, along with their northern Germanized neighbours, from the Roman Church in the sixteenth century. The result is a curious one: the modern East Prussians are mainly Polish-speaking, but largely Protestant, among the Masurian Lakes, and German-speaking, and, for Germans, rather unusually long-headed on the coastal plain. In the recent plebiscite even the Masurian Poles showed marked aversion to incorporation in the re-created and intensely Roman Catholic republic of Poland, and it seems probable that, when treaty allocations are finally made, the Masurians as well as the coastal peoples will remain under Germany. East Prussia is a rural region with large estates, and this fact, added to that of its position as a sort of German frontier outpost, has made it intensely patriotic and very conservatively minded. The East Prussian population becomes mixed with people of Lithuanian speech across the Niemen, but Memel, as a town, is naturally largely German. Its fate is (April 1922) not yet settled.
The other groups of German speech and associations in Eastern Europe beyond the Vistula and Austria are in no case sufficiently large to be described aspeoples, though they form important communities, and it may be useful to give a short list here.
In Hungary they occur in numbers in the Pécs district (south-west), around Budapest, north-west of the Bakony Wald, &c.
In Yugoslavia there are groups in the Backa, between the lower Theiss and the Danube, and in the Banat.
The enlarged Rumania has a number of German groups in the metalliferous district east of the Banat, between the upper Maros and the upper Alt, especially near Sibiu (formerly Hermannstadt), around Cluj (formerly Kolozsvar) and Bistrita (Bistritz), in Bukovina, and also in southern Bessarabia.
Numerous groups are studded along the Bug and around the southern side of the Pripet Marshes. In South Russia there are again several groups in the Odessa region and north of the Sea of Azov. Still larger numbers live along the Volga in the Saratov region. The German settlements in Transylvania, often loosely styled Saxon, date in large part from the twelfth century, and the people came in considerable numbers from the Rhine in its 'Low German' section; the Bukovina and Russian areas received their German influx towards the end of the eighteenth century.
Having now referred to Italians, French, and Germans, it seems appropriate to invite consideration of the Swiss people, so marked a unit in European life in spite of differences of language, religion, and economic activity. A very early but apparently incomplete development of the settled life on lake shores was correlated with a good deal of seasonal and other migration of people using the hill pastures in summer and developing dairying activities. Feudal localism came in as on the more open areas round about, but did not take such root as it did on the richer plains, so that though, with exceptions (p. 23), the form of speech approximated to thatof surrounding lands (Italian, French, and Alemannic), political domination by the surrounding lands was strongly and, in the end, successfully resisted. The landed aristocracy in the end either left the poor territory (parts of Neuchatel) or gave up their privileges and merged in the people as leaders (especially in French and German Switzerland); they had to be anoblesse de campagnerather than anoblesse de cour, and the fate of the former, even in France, but much more in Norway and in Finland, has been to merge itself in the people. There has been a persistence of localism without the accompaniment of feudalism, and the cantons have democratized their government to a remarkable degree, developing pacific ideals combined with zeal for local defence. They now furnish a most interesting example of a strong union for defensive purposes with little possibility of the passing of defence into aggression. Centuries of poverty have led to emigration and to a keenness on intellectual equipment paralleled in Scotland, Denmark, and modern Wales, but reaching a unique level in Switzerland with its seven institutions of university rank and their relatively enormous student population. The value of the Swiss Universities has brought them students from all over the world, and the hospitality of Switzerland to refugees and to tourists has made the country a most important international centre, as the Red Cross and the League of Nations head-quarters testify. Side by side with this has grown the importance of Switzerland as a banking centre, this line of work being much promoted by the growing tension in economic relations in Europe, due to the huge development of militarist aggression since 1895. Another aspect of this development of banking has been that connected with the industrial transformation of several parts of Switzerland through application of hydro-electric power, a process which has brought Switzerland into closer relation with South Germany and North Italy, and has made her external commerce an important matter. It need hardly be said that Switzerland'shospitality to refugees has brought her craftsmen, thinkers, and artists for centuries, and has thus enormously enriched her life. The debts of Holland and of the British Isles to refugees from the intellectual elite of other lands may be compared with that of Switzerland. In Britain the families at the centre of the commercial and intellectual life of our cities are often closely bound up with groups of refugees, as their association with Unitarian Churches and the Society of Friends often shows.
Another region which may appropriately be treated after consideration of the Romance and the German Teutonic peoples is the British Isles. Reference has already been made to the British and Irish peoples in the chapter on races (p. 11) and the section on the Celtic languages (p. 18). It was there suggested that these islands were a remote fringing region in ancient times, and as such retain old types of long-headed men, with comparatively little alteration, such as the types of Combe Capelle man of Aurignacian times, the related river-bed types, and the long-barrow types of later, but probably still pre-Bronze Age, times.
At the dawn of the Bronze Age came others, mainly broad-headed types, among whom we can distinguish the brawny, rough-browed 'Beaker-making' people found in the round barrows and surviving, much refined in some cases, in the modern population, the strongly built and sometimes tall, dark broad-heads still found on patches along our western coasts and around the coasts of Ireland, and provisionally identified with the prospectors for tin and copper who spread from the eastern Mediterranean in the third and perhaps the second millennium before Christ, the broad-heads of the short cist graves of our east coasts especially from the Humber to Caithness, the tall longer-headed people of the Iron Age (La Tene) movements, and the descendants of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Vikings, all more or less tall and fair, and for the most part long-headed. The Norman Conquest seems to have brought in broad-heads from across theChannel, as one judges from contents of mediaeval ossuaries, which sometimes contrast strikingly with the modern populations of their districts. It seems likely that the growth of modern industrialism has led to a resurgence of the older and dark long-headed types, which seem able to withstand the evil conditions of the slums to some extent, while the tall, fair long-heads and the descendants of the beaker-makers seem inclined to drift off, unless circumstances allow them to rise to a position of leadership and comfort.
The study of language shows how completely Teutonic speech replaced Celtic, even as regards names of settlements, on the English plain, though eager etymology may have exaggerated this completeness and may have unduly emphasized the change of population supposed to be involved. The fractionation of old elements among the Welsh hills has permitted the old language to survive, though it is now spoken not so much by the physical heirs of the people who brought it to Britain as by the older stocks to whom they taught it. The openness and good centres of the Central Lowland of Scotland were unfavourable to the survival of Celtic, which it was so hard to mingle with Teutonic speech, but this compact region, well marked off from the English plain by the southern uplands, the Cheviots, and the moorlands of north England, kept a sufficient organization (largely of the Celtic Church) through the post-Roman centuries to hand on many of the old place-names and to develop an organized national consciousness at the earliest opportunity. Wales, lacking an administrative centre, has lost its law but kept its language. Scotland, with the great centres of its Central Lowland, has developed its own law, but its old languages are almost gone.
History follows out for us the growth of national consciousness on the English plain in Plantagenet times right up to its organization under the Tudors and its great outburst under Elizabeth, when the common revolt of the English plain and central Scotlandagainst Rome drew the two historic units towards one another, helped by community of language and by the weakening of old ties between Lowland Scotland and Catholic Bourbon France. The rise of industrialism may be said to have consummated the union, albeit with an attendant loss of valuable elements of the population in the events following eighteenth-century highland rebellions and nineteenth-century evictions for the creation of deer forests. The remnants of old-time people and ways in the western Highlands and the Hebrides are nevertheless interesting and important from several points of view; they preserve valuable elements of traditional civilization, and possibly even distinctive spiritual faculties, which our industrial civilization seems to kill, or at any rate to damp down.
Ireland, it will be seen, was not led to co-operation with England in at all the same ways, and it also illustrates the diversity which is so apt to persist in off-shore islands, largely because of the diverse outlooks of their different shores (compare Ceylon, Java, Crete, &c.). In the case of Ireland the poverty of its centre has played a great part in maintaining disunion. But neither was it led to revolt against Rome along with England and Scotland, nor was it transformed as they were by industrialism, save in its north-east corner. So,mutatis mutandis, the small, if interesting survivals of old tradition and feeling noticed in the western Highlands are the characteristic of large areas of Ireland, and its Catholicism has been ever deeper rooted in the people's minds by the bitterly cruel persecutions maintained by England. The net result has thus been, as in Czechoslovakia, a tendency to redevelop separate and antagonistic national consciousness, and to make it likely that association rather than subordination is the line of solution of this difficult problem. The openness of Ireland to the sea and her many connexions with the Continent seem to have been, along with repressive politics, causes of loss of native language which, in any case, would have been difficult to adjustto modern needs, so that Ireland is a case of nationality in which the language basis is not a real vital fact, however much enthusiasts may try to insist on it. But apart from this the cases of Ireland and Czechoslovakia are remarkably analogous; the latter is as much within striking distance of the German centres as Ireland is within striking distance of us, they both have an industrial element which finds it difficult to co-operate with the agricultural majority and claims separate treatment, both look back to centuries of unhappy memories of undoubted wrongs, and both have strong claims on the thoughts of those who desire peace.
The Scottish people have found amodus vivendi, and with the recent growth of toleration amodus vivendihas almost been attained for the Welsh people, but in any case the matter of Wales is different from that of Ireland; the language difference in Wales does not cut so deep as the religious difference in Ireland, and the industrialized population is a majority in Wales, but a minority in Ireland. The gradation of Welsh into English on the Welsh side of the border is another important factor in the case of Wales, and that country is becomingly increasingly able to develop the spiritual heritage of her rural areas in pacific fashion. With moderation on the part of England there seems hope that Great Britain may thus be able to maintain and develop a scheme of unity-in-diversity, and recent developments hold out hopes for Ireland too.
Man with its Gaelic and Norse elements, the Hebrides with their immemorial survivals, Orkney and Shetland with their Norse background, are all of great interest to the ethnologist, and contribute interesting diversities to the enrichment of British civilization, but hardly constitute serious problems.
We now come to the Low German and Scandinavian peoples.
The Dutch include the fair-haired Nordic and Nordic Alpine people of what may be called the mainland, and the dark broad-heads of the islands of the Rhine mouth. Whether these latter are Alpine peoples or maritime settlers of prehistoric time one does not know, but their strong seafaring interests, on the whole, support the latter hypothesis, in spite of the power of environment. The common effort and common sacrifices to fight the sea have been a cement for the people of Holland, and, beyond the Rhine, they were comparatively little influenced by Rome. Their absorption in the struggle with the sea and their apartness from Romance Europe of the Middle Ages have had results in their provision of refuge for Jews and heretics, in their secession from Rome during the religious schism, and in their increasing separateness from their Flemish linguistic cousins on the Roman side of the fateful river. The thoughtfulness encouraged by old-established, if incomplete, toleration has made Holland contribute to thought in a way quite disproportionate to her size; and her sea-beggars, becoming in time sailors of the world's seas, inherited the East Indies from the Portuguese, and inaugurated what, under the English name of New York, has become the biggest port of the world. If vulnerability to organized militarism beyond her borders and England's advantages of position for maritime primacy have led Holland, especially with the growth of British industrialism, to fall somewhat to the rear commercially, her people, nevertheless, remain a most important element both in the life of Europe and in the commercial relations of the world. Her language has developed a literary standard to which have been approximated the Flemish dialects of a people strugglingfor recognition, but unlikely to seek union with Holland because of religious divergence. This nevertheless increases the strength of the Dutch tradition, while the growth of German industry has meant almost as much for both Rotterdam and Amsterdam as it has for Antwerp. Further, the provisioning of the big centres of industry has given Holland new commercial opportunities, and she is thus in a position to play her part in relation to her big German and English neighbours, while nevertheless maintaining her own individuality, and, indeed, making that individuality rather a difficulty in connexion with the complex international problem of Antwerp and the Scheldt. That problem, being one of economics rather than of peoples, need not be discussed here beyond an indication of the extremely international development of that premier outlet for the European plain prior to 1914.
Standardized German has not ousted old forms of speech in the rural parts of the north-west German coasts, and there has been a tendency to give Frisian literary expression in the nineteenth century, but this movement, like that in favour of Provençal, has not gone far enough to have economic influence or to bear much upon politics. On the whole, with the growth of systems of education, Frisian has receded, and is now chiefly spoken on the west coast of Holstein and of the part of Slesvig which, by plebiscite, has recently decided to remain German.
Denmark at the Baltic entry, and linked to the life of that sea especially by its islands and the important passage of the Sound, makes with Norway and Sweden the Scandinavian sub-group in the Teutonic family of languages, and here nations and languages correspond reasonably closely.
Whereas Holstein, at the base of the peninsula of Jutland, became included in the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages, Slesvig remained outside that attempted organization. German speech and thought pervaded South Slesvig as far north as thefjord which has Flensburg at its head, but in spite of political effort, 1864-1914, North Slesvig remained steadily Danish in feeling, and has now been liberated to rejoin the little kingdom. The boundary chosen seems to show a fair-minded interpretation of the recent plebiscite, though there are minorities on both sides of the line.
Denmark has a very long story from the days of her prehistoric kitchen-middens onwards, and she owes something to the fact that Jutland was in some sort a north-western terminus of a belt of loess, heath, and sand-hill, stretching westward from the steppe border of South Russia. Along this belt came to her the pre-Bronze Age immigrants distinguished by their 'Beaker pottery', and the amber trade seems to have used a part of this route.
The Danes have thus long been a racial complex, but the fair Nordic type predominates on the whole. Denmark's share, especially in the organizing aspects of the great maritime movements of post-Roman times, is well known, but Petersson's view that this occurred during a period of favourable climate and ice-free coasts in the northern seas helps one to realize the connexion of that activity with a particular period. The association of Denmark and Norway in maritime activity was long continued, and when the latter fell on bad times in the Middle Ages, the domination of the former became very marked. The political aspect of the matter is outside our scope, but with the nineteenth century the weakening of Denmark under German pressure loosed the bonds, and circumstances gave Norway in the end a remarkable opportunity. It thus came about that in 1864 Denmark saw the end of herancien régime, and began a new career. The name of her Bishop Grundtvig stands out in company with that of Abbé of Jena and a few others in the drab century of commercial imperialisms. He set out to re-educate the Danish people in co-operation and simplicity, and, with his high schools for the development not so much of the technicalities as of theamenities of life, he became one of those who builded better than he knew. The sheer financial success of the new agriculture of Denmark, thanks to skilled co-operative organization, is an outstanding phenomenon, however much may be due to the general increase of prosperity of the stock-raiser in the regions round the manufacturing centres. Copenhagen has become a centre for the wholesale marketing of butter, with train ferries and other communications making links with Esbjerg, with Germany, with Sweden, and across to the east side of the Baltic. Like Switzerland and Holland, Denmark contributes in no small measure to the intellectual life of Europe, partly through the opportunities her sons find in Berlin and other large centres of the big nations.
Of the first peopling of Norway comparatively little is known, but the population must have been sparse indeed until man was fairly well equipped to cope with that region's serious difficulties. It is a country of ledges along a broken coast, fantastically cut by fjords which are deep valleys of the edge of a high plateau modified by ice and then partially submerged under the sea. The partial submergence has converted outlying hillocks into a maze of islands, between which and the land there is, for long distances, a fairly open channel, an old longitudinal valley no doubt. The men of the fjords are in large measure of the tall, fair, long-headed Nordic type, but around the seaward ends of the southern fjords are dark broad-heads, who in this case are almost beyond doubt settlers from the sea. The physical geography of Trondhjem Fjord, on land and water, helps to make clear its special early importance, particularly during a period of good climate, but the whole of Norway suffered sadly in the fourteenth century from bad harvests and Hanseatic interference, and from that time onwards to the nineteenth century Norway's fortunes were low.
As in other lands of ancient poverty (note Finland and Switzerland) the nineteenth century brought the final merging of the old aristocracy in the people; the relation with Denmark wasloosed 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 theLapps, 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 thoseof 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.
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 ofRomance 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 subordinateFinn-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 theraison d'êtreof 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 thecapital 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'.
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 feelingwhich 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 wassolved 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 Rhinelands 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 isto 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 itis 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 severecold 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 extentin 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 ortranshumance(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 therewithof 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 ofpriesthood 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. Religiousorganization 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 ancientArctic 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 tobring 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 moreopen 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.