In our imagination the local racial types of Europe have been
identified with the modern nations, and thus the supposed hereditary
characteristics of the races have been confused with national
characteristics. An identification of racial type, of language, and of
nationality has been made, that has gained an exceedingly strong hold
on our imagination. In vain sober scientific thought has remonstrated
against this identification; the idea is too firmly rooted. Even if it
is true that the blond type is found at present pre-eminently among
Teutonic people, it is not confined to them alone. Among the Finns,
Poles, French, North Italians, not to speak of the North African
Berbers and the Kurds of western Asia, there are many individuals of
this type. The heavy-set, dark East-European type is common to many of
the Slavic peoples of eastern Europe, to the Germans of Austria and
southern Germany, to the North Italians, and to the French of the Alps
and of central France. The Mediterranean type is spread widely over
Spain, Italy, Greece, and the coast of Asia Minor, without regard to
national boundaries.
In western Europe, types are distributed in strata that follow one
another from north to south,--in the north the blonde, in the center a
dark, short-headed type, in the south the slightly built Mediterranean
type.
_National boundaries in central Europe, on the other hand, run north
and south: and so we find the northern French, Belgian, Hollander,
German, and Russian to be about the same in type and descent; the
central French, South German, Swiss, North Italian, Austrian, Servian,
and central Russian, to be all the same variety of man; and the
southern French, to be closely related to the types of the eastern and
western Mediterranean area._
At the present moment the relation of German and Slav is of principal
interest. During the period of Teutonic migrations, in the first few
centuries of our era, the Slavs settled in the whole region from which
Teutonic tribes had moved away. They occupied the whole of what is now
eastern Germany. In the Middle Ages, with the growth of the German
Empire, a slow backward movement set in. Germans settled as colonists
in Slavic territory, and by degrees German speech prevailed over the
Slavic. In Germany, survivals of the gradual process may be found in a
few remote localities where Slavic speech still persists. As by contact
with the more advanced Germans the cultural and economic conditions
of the Slav improved, his resistance to Germanization became greater
and greater,--earliest among the Czechs and Poles, later in the other
Slavic groups.
This process has led to the present distribution of languages, which
expresses a fossilization of German colonization in the east, and
illustrates in a most striking way the penetration of peoples. Poland
and part of Russia, Slavonic and Magyar territories, are interspersed
with small German settlements, which are the more sparse and scattered
the farther east they are located, the more continuous the nearer they
lie to Germany.
With the increased economic and cultural strength of the Slav, the
German lost his ability to impose his mode of life upon him, and with
it his power to assimilate the numerically stronger people in its own
home. But by blood all these people, no matter what their speech, are
the same.
In short, _there is no war of races in Europe_; for in every single
nationality concerned in the present struggle the various elements
of the European population are represented, and arrayed against the
same elements as grouped together in another nationality. The conflict
has nothing whatever to do with racial descent. The so-called racial
antipathies are feelings that have grown up on another basis and have
been given a fictitious racial interpretation.
If we deny the presence of racial contrasts, it may not be amiss to
say a word on the fact that we may distinguish with more or less
uncertainty individuals that belong to distinct nationalities. This
common experience might seem contradictory to what has been said
before; but we form concepts of national types partly from essential
elements of the form of the body, partly from the mannerisms of wearing
hair and beard, and also from the characteristic expressions and
motions of the body, which are determined not so much by hereditary
causes as by habit. On the whole, the latter are more impressive than
the former; and among the nations that are concerned in the present
struggle, no fundamental traits of the body occur that belong to one to
the exclusion of the others.
It is clear that the term _race_ is only a disguise of the idea of
_nationality_, which has really very, very little to do with racial
descent; and that the passions that have been let loose are those of
national enmities, not of racial antipathies.
If community of racial descent is not the basis of nationality, is it
community of language?
When we glance at the national aspirations that have characterized a
large part of the nineteenth century, community of language might
seem to be the background of national life. It touches the most
sympathetic chords in our hearts. Italians worked for the overthrow
of all the small local and great foreign interests that were opposed
to the national unity of all Italian-speaking people. German patriots
strove for the federation of the German-speaking people in one empire.
The struggles in the Balkans are largely due to a desire for national
independence according to the limits of speech. The Poles are longing
for a re-establishment of their state which is to embrace all those of
Polish tongue.