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
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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
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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.
{45}
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
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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.
{51}
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.