and put themselves in the position of landowners and leaders over
a Ruthenian peasantry. The landlords were attached to the
Roman Catholic faith, but the peasants to the Uniate Church
until the latter was crushed by Russia. The border of the
Ukraine towards the steppe is a very doubtful matter. Here
is the zone of unrest, with Tatar pressure at times and European
pressure at others; it is the limit of the settled life, and the
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cultivated patches have needed specially watchful defence. Under
these conditions the Cossack people have grown up with a military
order of society and landholding for service. The people seem
to include an element of the old long-headed population (see
pp. 11, 14, and 77), together with both Slav and Tatar contributions,
Jews and Germans in the towns which are mostly of recent
creation, and a motley gathering of escaped serfs and landless
men from all around.
The Don Cossacks are fairly distinct from the Orenburg and
Siberian Cossacks who live east of the desert patches that lie
north-west of the Caspian Sea. In what is broadly Cossack
country lies the very different Kuban country, with an almost
Mediterranean climate and possibilities of fruit cultivation; it
is said to have had an autonomous organization of its own for
some time during the recent years of unrest. Its people are
doubtless related to various elements among the Cossacks, but
one gathers that the descendants of old traders are more marked
than elsewhere. The Tatar (Turki) groups are so obviously an
intrusion from Asia that we need not say much about them as
such; we may more profitably think of them as pressing upon
Europe at one time and being pressed upon by Europe at another.
Their tribal organization on a kinship basis and their mobility
have given them a power and a cohesion for offensive purposes
from time to time, and as Huns, Magyars, Bulgars, Szeklers, and
Tatars, they have been formidable hindrances to the settlement
of East and South-east Europe on western lines. We may note
first that Huns, Magyars, Szeklers, and Bulgars, penetrating far
from the South Russian steppe either past the Iron Gates, or
through the Carpathians or over the Danube into the Balkan
Mountains, have become settled folk.
In Hungary they have formed a landed aristocracy with its
rural dependants, while leaving the peopling of the towns largely
to Jews and Germans and persons of mixed blood. In the Balkan
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Mountains under less spacious conditions and with Turk
interference they have merged into a South Slav people, but have
modified that people and its language in the course of the process.
In South and East Russia there are many groups still distinct, and
the Crimea has long been theirs in principle. The relation of
these Asiatic warriors with Muscovy makes up the political
history of the Middle Ages in the future Russian plain, and when
that plain did become Russian, its religious autocracy found
greater possibilities of co-operation with the Asiatic element than
with the Western Powers then developing so fast towards
industrialism. So it came about that Peter the Great's historic
experiment in westernization, difficult for reasons of climate,
position, and opportunities, failed, and the Tsardom was drawn
towards the Orient on the whole against its will.
The westward path of the Asiatic herdsmen beyond South
Russia led them into Moldavia and Wallachia, where the native
Vlach population sought refuge in the Carpathians and in the
hills of the centre of the Balkan Peninsula. It is a population
with a language of Latin syntactical affinities, and a 60 per
cent. Slav vocabulary, and is spoken by people who looked back with
pride to the days of Roman occupation of their land as Dacia.
So the Vlach people, essentially Central European round-heads
like the Slavs generally, have come to be distinct from their
neighbours in speech and in pride. In the matter of religion the
openness of the Danube entry and the coastal ways up the west
side of the Black Sea have made the people members of the
Eastern Church so far as Moldavia and Wallachia are concerned,
but the Vlachs of the Transylvanian hills are, or were, to
a large extent members of the Uniate Church (p. 70),
intermediate, as has been said, between the Roman and the Eastern.
After centuries of subjection and fractionization the Vlach peoples
have (1919) suddenly found themselves united in the new
Rumania, with the political and agrarian influence wrested from
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their former Magyar, Szekler, and German lords, and the
peasantry of Wallachia and Moldavia have also secured a good
deal of the land previously in aristocratic, though in this case
often not alien hands. The old direction of the country was in
the hands of the aristocracy, and was often much criticized in
the west. The Jewish and German town populations were said
to be specially held down. Whether the new government will
merely continue the old with a peasant admixture or whether it
will seek to take a new line, remains to be seen. It is at any rate
interesting that this large language group is, for the first time,
a governmental unit, and tragic that so inexperienced a group
has within it such large and, for that matter, valuable elements
of alien language. It is said that the Oriental aspect of society
is well marked in the lesser towns, the greater having been
westernized, but it is questionable whether we should not be
more correct in describing these lesser towns as more resembling
our own in early mediaeval times before the garden-closes were
built upon to accommodate people crowding within their walls
for protection.
The Vlachs beyond the new Rumania, in the centre of the
Balkan Peninsula, illustrate for us a noteworthy problem of that
troubled region. Whereas if we wish to get a picture of the
early stages of the settled life of cultivation in Europe we naturally
look to Russia, we may go to the Balkans for glimpses of the
remnants of the still earlier scheme of society when kinship groups
moved from place to place with flocks and herds. In the Peninsula
the western mountains shelter many a clan of ancient local
lineage, and much as these mountain clans have been affected by
Slav, Bulgar, Greek, Roman, Turkish, Magyar, and German-Austrian
pressure, a considerable group have remained true to
their pre-Slavonic language (Albanian), and, despite deep religious
differences amongst themselves, seem to tend towards some vague
national unity, largely as a protection against Greek and Slav in
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the next generation. It is well to realize that these old
populations, even when Slavonized, are often most distinct from the
Slavs, and that they and the Vlachs are the nearest approaches
we have to an autochthonous population in the Peninsula. They
for the most part limit their movements to seasonal shifts up and
down hill, and, like the Highlanders of Scotland and others
similarly situated, have done their share of raiding on valley
cultivators, for if 'the mountain sheep are sweeter, the valley
sheep are fatter', as Peacock put it. Among the Albanian peoples
the Greek Church has done a good deal of propaganda at various
times, and as they are near the Adriatic and the Roman Via
Egnatia, the Roman Church has also used opportunities of
reinforcing them against Greek pressure. Moreover, all along this
mountain country Manichaean ideas replaced old heathendom
and primitive Christianity alike, and with the Manichaean
objection to symbolism and all approach to idolatry there was
a natural tendency to accept Islam without too much difficulty,
when it was brought by conquerors. So along the western
mountains of the Balkan Peninsula are many old groups confirmed
in their ancient possessions by the Turk, and practising
Islam in succession to Manichaean doctrines rather than to
Christianity. As the people on the fringes of the truly Albanian
clans speak two languages, in many cases there is as much doubt
about the proper political boundary of an Albanian state as there
would be about that of a Welsh state were it proposed to make
one separate from and hostile to England! Much harm has
recently been done by conscientious demarcators taking the
frontier line along 'empty' ridges which were really summer
pastures or ways thereto for many a shepherd clan now cut off
from its livelihood and ruined or forced to maraud. Among the
Albanian clansmen the leaders are often rather fine types with
the strength arising from a long maintenance of tradition, the
change to Islam not having been as fundamental as might be
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supposed. It is the more regrettable that the antipathies
between them and their Slavonized brethren should have become
so acute.
In the west of the peninsula, north of the region of Albanian
speech, many of the people are Slavonized autochthones, rather
than real Slav intruders, and this is true of the mountains of
Montenegro and of Bosnia, in the latter of which large numbers
of the landed folk are Muslim. The Slav peoples have, however,
penetrated everywhere from the valleys of the Save and Morava,
though one can still often recognize the old hill-type at sight.
Both are broad-headed, and are branches of the same basal stock,
but the old hill-type is often bigger and more lithe, and there
seem to be accompanying mental differences. At any rate these
distinctions were found practically useful in contacts with refugees
from Serbia in the recent war. The distinction between the
Illyrio-Slav and the Bulgar-Slav on the west and east of the
Balkan Peninsula is one with indefinite gradations and with
collateral complications due to Vlach elements on the hills and
long-established Greek elements along the coastal plain. The
appeal to race and language as a basis for political division is
almost futile; the appeal to history is misleading, for as in the
early west of Europe, so also here we find sudden growths and
more sudden collapses of empires based upon the ability and
ambitions of a leader; the appeal to religion has been encouraged
by the fact that Eastern Christianity tends to encourage national
churches and has education in its hands. We thus find that the
Bulgars by educational propaganda made their variant of Balkan
speech the definitive one in most of Macedonia, and that the
conflict between them and the Serbs has become fatally acute,
the more so as both have been used as cat's-paws by the Great
Powers of Europe ever since the Turkish hold weakened. The
erection of organized political frontiers within the Peninsula
limited the power of movement of the wandering shepherds, and
{83}
seems to have affected especially the Vlach elements of the centre,
which are said to be losing their separate character and to be
settling down. It also sharpened the internecine conflict, especially
since Russia, France, and Britain saw their opportunity of using
Serbia, from 1906 onwards, to resist the Central Powers, while
Bulgaria became of less interest to the Tsardom as she grew strong
enough to do without Russian tutelage.
Broadly then, while Russia gave us an example of the poor
success of an attempt to fasten a State organization on a population
deeply immersed in localism and traditionalism but settled
and cultivating the land, the Balkan Peninsula illustrates tragically
the weaknesses of competing attempts to fasten State organizations
on a population, parts of which have as yet barely reached
the stage of settlement. The difficulties within the Peninsula
are undoubtedly enhanced by the sharp contrasts between the
highland interior and the coastal fringe on which for milleniums
already the influences of Crete and Babylon, Phoenicia, Greece
and Rome have been playing.
It is a Mediterranean fringe with its hoe cultivation and
olive-trees already long established as the successors of an ancient
barley culture, and it has trade as such a long-standing secondary
feature of its life that observers not infrequently mistake it for
the primary one. Roman ideas have spread along the Istrian and
Dalmatian shores, and, in spite of Slavonizing influences, have
remained strong at Zara, Fiume, and Trieste, while, though
Croatia and Slavonia have remained Slavonic, their religion has
become Roman Catholic and their alphabet western. It thus
comes about that a not very deep difference of language between
the Slav regions of Serbia, on the one hand, and of Slavonia and
Croatia on the other is emphasized because the one uses the
Cyrillic alphabet, the others the western, and each has its systems
of schools on a religious basis, a serious problem for the new State
of Yugoslavia. It is probable that the recent settlement of the
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Adriatic quarrel between Italy and Yugoslavia represents a fair
compromise so far as the two are concerned.
South of Albania and around the Aegean the coastal fringe is
dominated by the Greek element, and the new Greece claims to
include all these coastal lands and to have the reversion of
Constantinople, the great inter-continental city which at the same
time commands the way from the steppe-lands to the Great Sea.
Constantinople is the more maritime successor of the less maritime
Troy of antiquity, and this, in conjunction with its history as
the basis of the Eastern Empire, the head-quarters of the Eastern
Church, and the seat of the Caliphate of Islam, all seems to argue
against its absorption in a nation-state organization and its
government by trustees acting not less for Islam than for Europe.
The problem of Constantinople is also that of the coastal fringe,
wherever the interior is non-Greek. On the language basis the
Greek claim is strong; on the economic basis, again, the traders
have rights of protection, but the cutting off of the coast from
the interior must be prejudicial to the latter. Unfortunately,
a trusteeship for government is almost put out of the question
by the fact that practically every European Great Power has
intrigued for a paramount influence, and all are justly suspect.
Thus both the national and the international solution of the
problem of a political and social organization of Balkan life seem
fraught with difficulty, and one can but urge the old, old argument
against preaching 'Peace, peace', where there is no peace. The
present hope would seem to be in the smaller nations of Europe
and perhaps in the American powers, for Latin America seems
likely to wish to play such a part in the reorganization of the
world as its growing economic importance justifies.
The real difficulties of the Balkan peoples are enhanced in every
way by their disastrous political history, for none have, for centuries
past, had reasonable opportunities of self-expression. They therefore
lack the experience and the discipline of government, and they
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have little effective written tradition, with the result that what
is written now is often very different from the spoken language
of the peasantry, and is correspondingly artificial and lacking in
healthy standardization. One may contrast the good fortune of
the Norwegians in having relatively peaceful opportunities of
revival of folk life and in having the wise and luminous Bjornsen
to develop literary expression in continuity with folk tradition.
Of the Turk in Europe one cannot at present say much that is
definite. He is largely Europeanized in physique, and it is
doubtful whether much that is truly Turk remains in Europe outside
eastern Thrace. The Muslim elements in Albania and Bosnia
have other origins for the most part, as has been discussed.
Constantinople and Adrianople are markedly Turk.
While, then, the various new states of the Peninsula are largely
on a language basis, it should be noticed that Vlach-speaking
peoples are scattered in groups in what is now Yugoslavia, and
their numbers are variously estimated up to 250,000 or more.
A considerable portion of Yugoslav Macedonia would probably
consider itself Bulgar, and there are Greek elements in the
Macedonian towns. Apart from Greek elements in the towns there
is little that is alien in the reduced Bulgaria. Rumania has groups
of many languages and traditions in all her newly acquired
territories, and will need to exercise every care to prevent serious
trouble in the near future. Yugoslavia includes a good deal of
German, a little Italian, some Magyar, and some Rumanian, as
well as Greek and more or less Bulgar elements, and a neutral
commission should go carefully into the question of the Albanian
boundaries. Italy's gains in Istria include a large Yugoslav
element. Greek acquisitions have such a mixed population that
little can be stated in detail. Finally, the Jewish element is of
widespread importance in the towns; the Ashkenazim (Central
European) element being very strong in Wallachia, and especially
in Moldavia, and the Sephardim element (once Spanish) having
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its head-quarters at Salonica. Before leaving the Balkan peoples
it should be pointed out that, apart from their ancient hatreds,
there is really every reason for mutual help between them.
Rumania with its wheat and maize, Serbia with its forest-fed
pigs and its plums and other fruits, Bulgaria with its mixed
farming, and the Greek zones with their oil and wine, could
supplement each other if suspicions were diminished and mutual
credit arranged. The Greek element, with its long experience
of commerce, would be a natural intermediary, as Venizelos
saw when he planned a Balkan Federation; the obvious danger
would be that of exploitation of producers by middlemen,
especially if the latter were in a strong position politically.
The use of Czech, Slovak, Polish, Ruthenian, Serb, Croat, and
Slovene for centuries largely as rural languages, with German to
a considerable extent a lingua franca for educated intercourse,
and Magyar imposed in and around Hungary by an aristocracy,
hindered the growth of the Slavonic languages until the nineteenth
century, and in that century it has been especially Czech,
Polish, and Croat that have pushed forward towards the status
of languages of civilization. Ruthenian remains in a sense the
most backward member of the group, so much so that its claims
have been conspicuously disregarded by the makers of the recent
treaties. The Ruthenes west of the Carpathians inhabit a poor
region which is to be included in Czechoslovakia with a measure
of local autonomy. Ruthenes in what was once Galicia are
largely under Polish proprietors, and that territory is to be
incorporated with Poland, while the Ruthenes of the Bukovina
and the west bank of the Dniester are now included in the
enormously enlarged Rumania. It may be that under the new
conditions these peoples will settle into the framework created
by the treaties, a framework based to a considerable extent upon
physical geography. But, on the other hand, if the Ukraine
should become strong and the Ruthenian language develop, there
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is undoubtedly the possibility of the growth of an idea of 'Ruthenia
Irredenta' which may bring difficulties later on. At present
Ruthenes might well use Russian as their language.
This seems the most appropriate place for a brief catalogue of
the peoples of East-Central and Eastern Europe whose languages
do not belong to the Indo-European family, though many have
already been mentioned. The Lapps moving between the high
moorlands of Scandinavia and the Kola peninsula speak a language
belonging to the Arctic-Asiatic group and are nomad herdsmen
of the reindeer; their numbers are small, but they provide a
curious background to Scandinavian life; and a certain amount
of intermarriage has caused some Swedes to carry their features.
Forms of Finnish speech, all more or less akin, are widespread from
Finland to the Urals, and the nationalist and democratic
movements of the last century have strengthened the speech of the
Finlanders proper at the expense of Swedish, the old language of
external culture relations in West Finland, and of Russian which
the Tsarist government sought to impose. Esth is closely related
to Finnish, and under the new conditions of nominal independence
may maintain itself by association with Finnish in spite of poverty
of land and people. Livonian is related to Esth and still survives
in parts of Latvia. Various groups of Finns, retaining their
languages, still remain distinct in the government of Perm and
near Kazan and Saratov. The Tatar groups on the grassland
and desert-border in South-east Russia so obviously belong to
Asia that they may be omitted from this survey. Like so many
mountain regions the Caucasus forms a refuge for ancient racial
types, old customs, and old forms of speech, but a survey of these
would take us far from European problems.
Bulgar has been mentioned as a language with a Tatar element,
though it has been very largely Slavonized, but this fate has not
overcome the Magyar tongue, which is the distinctive feature of the
erstwhile ruling caste in Hungary and Transylvania. The language
{88}
is used both by the Magyars of Hungary and by the Szeklers,
who are a people of closely related origins, in parts of
Transylvania. The people are almost completely Europeanized in their
physique, but as they secured some degree of national cohesion
and of close attachment to their soil at an early stage of history,
their language has lived on, and of late its use has been fostered
by political ambition; it has become a mark of a ruling caste. It
may now become the rallying ground of aspirations for national
recovery after the collapse of 1918 and the severities of the recent
treaty. The Powers of Europe in framing the new boundaries
have at least suggested a campaign of linguistic nationalism to the
Magyars, for the reduced Hungary has considerable numbers of
people speaking its language who are now subjects of the states
around its borders. There has been no incentive to outsiders
to learn Magyar, and it remains isolated in Europe, useless beyond
its homeland and unlikely to contribute much to other languages.
9
_Some Phases of Evolution of European Life before the
Industrial Revolution_
We have now glanced around all the chief language groups in
Europe, and in the course of this rapid survey have noted that
whereas the peoples of Romance and Teutonic speech have built
up the organization known as the nation-state, in most cases on
a basis of linguistic unity, the peoples of the Slavonic regions,
with the partial exception of Bohemia, have hardly achieved this.
The intermingling of peoples and the difference of tradition
between town and country over wide areas are in part the cause
of this, but it has also been suggested that, in the east of Europe,
we have still surviving an earlier stage of the process of settlement
in the cleared forest than farther west, while in the south-east
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we note the persistence of elements still hardly settled at all. It
will therefore repay us if we now try to make a rapid survey of
the evolution of the process of settlement with its variants in
different regions and of the indications of persistence of different
stages of the general process in various parts, chiefly of Eastern
Europe.