Chapter II: Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4

_The Peoples of German Speech_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5

_Some Peoples intermediate between Romance and
Germanic in speech_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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6

_Peoples of Low German and Scandinavian Speech_

We now come to the Low German and Scandinavian peoples.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7

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

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

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

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