an artificial process, but which still is undoubtedly a nation in the
face of other nations. We now come to the other class, in which
nationality and language keep the connection which they have elsewhere,
but in which nations do not even in the roughest way answer to
governments. We have only to go into the Eastern lands of Europe to find
a state of things in which the notion of nationality, as marked out by
language and national feeling, has altogether parted company from the
notion of political government. It must be remembered that this state of
things is not confined to the nations which are or have lately been
under the yoke of the Turk. It extends also to the nations or fragments
of nations which make up the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. In all the lands
held by these two powers we come across phenomena of geography, race,
and language, which stand out in marked contrast with any thing to which
we are used in Western Europe. We may perhaps better understand what
those phenomena are, if we suppose a state of things which sounds absurd
in the West, but which has its exact parallel in many parts of the East.
Let us suppose that in a journey through England we came successively to
districts, towns, or villages, where we found, one after another, first,
Britons speaking Welsh; then Romans speaking Latin; then Saxons or
Angles speaking an older form of our own tongue; then Scandinavians
speaking Danish; then Normans speaking Old-French; lastly perhaps a
settlement of Flemings, Huguenots, or Palatines, still remaining a
distinct people and speaking their own tongue. Or let us suppose a
journey through Northern France, in which we found at different stages,
the original Gaul, the Roman, the Frank, the Saxon of Bayeux, the Dane
of Coutances, each remaining a distinct people, each of them keeping the
tongue which they first brought with them into the land. Let us suppose
further that, in many of these cases, a religious distinction was added
to a national distinction. Let us conceive one village Roman Catholic,
another Anglican, others Nonconformist of various types, even if we do
not call up any remnants of the worshippers of Jupiter or of Woden. All
this seems absurd in any Western country, and absurd enough it is. But
the absurdity of the West is the living reality of the East. There we
may still find all the chief races which have ever occupied the country,
still remaining distinct, still keeping separate tongues, and those for
the most part, their own original tongues. Within the present and late
European dominions of the Turk, the original races, those whom we find
there at the first beginnings of history, are all there still, and two
of them keep their original tongues. They form three distinct nations.
First of all there are the Greeks. We have not here to deal with them as
the representatives of that branch of the Roman Empire which adopted
their speech, but simply as one of the original elements in the
population of the Eastern peninsula. Known almost down to our own day by
their historical name of Romans, they have now fallen back on the name
of Hellênes. And to that name they have a perfectly good claim. If the
modern Greeks are not all true Hellênes, they are an aggregate of
adopted Hellênes gathered round and assimilated to a true Hellenic
kernel. Here we see the oldest recorded inhabitants of a large part of
the land abiding, and abiding in a very different case from the remnants
of the Celt and the Iberian in Western Europe. The Greeks are no
survival of a nation; they are a true and living nation, a nation whose
importance is quite out of its proportion to its extent in mere numbers.
They still abide, the predominant race in their own ancient and again
independent land, the predominant race in those provinces of the
continental Turkish dominion which formed part of their ancient land,
the predominant race through all the shores and islands of the Ægæan and
of part of the Euxine also. In near neighborhood to the Greeks still
live another race of equal antiquity, the Skipetar or Albanians. These,
as I believe is no longer doubted, represent the ancient Illyrians. The
exact degree of their ethnical kindred with the Greeks is a scientific
question which need not here be considered; but the facts that they are
more largely intermingled with the Greeks than any of the other
neighboring nations, that they show a special power of identifying
themselves with the Greeks, a power, so to speak, of becoming Greeks
and making part of the artificial Greek nation, are matters of practical
history. It must never be forgotten, that among the worthies of the
Greek War of Independence, some of the noblest were not of Hellenic but
Albanian blood. The Orthodox Albanian easily turns into a Greek; and the
Mahometan Albanian is something which is broadly distinguished from a
Turk. He has, as he well may have, a strong national feeling, and that
national feeling has sometimes got the better of religious divisions. If
Albania is among the most backward parts of the peninsula, still it is,
by all accounts, the part where there is most hope of men of different
religions joining together against the common enemy.
Here then are two ancient races, the Greeks and another race, not indeed
so advanced, so important, or so widely spread, but a race which equally
keeps a real national being. There is also a third ancient race which
survives as a distinct people, though they have for ages adopted a
foreign language. These are the Vlachs or Roumans, the surviving
representatives of the great race, call it Thracian or any other, which
at the beginning of history held the great inland mass of the Eastern
peninsula, with the Illyrians to the west of them and the Greeks to the
south. Every one knows, that in the modern principality of Roumania and
in the adjoining parts of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, there is to be
seen that phenomenon so unique in the East, a people who not only, as
the Greeks did till lately, still keep the Roman name, but who speak
neither Greek nor Turkish, neither Slav nor Skipetar, but a dialect of
Latin, a tongue akin, not to the tongues of any of their neighbors, but
to the tongues of Gaul, Italy, and Spain. And any one who has given any
real attention to this matter knows that the same race is to be found,
scattered here and there, if in some parts only as wandering shepherds,
in the Slavonic, Albanian, and Greek lands south of the Danube. The
assumption has commonly been that this outlying Romance people owe their
Romance character to the Roman colonization of Dacia under Trajan. In
this view, the modern Roumans would be the descendants of Trajan's
colonists and of Dacians who had learned of them to adopt the speech and
manners of Rome. But when we remember that Dacia was the first Roman
province to be given up--that the modern Roumania was for ages the
highway of every barbarian tribe on its way from the East to the
West--that the land has been conquered and settled and forsaken over and
over again,--it would be passing strange if this should be the one land,
and its people the one race, to keep the Latin tongue when it has been
forgotten in all the neighboring countries. In fact, this idea has been
completely dispersed by modern research. The establishment of the
Roumans in Dacia is of comparatively recent date, beginning only in the
thirteenth century. The Roumans of Wallachia, Moldavia, and
Transsilvania, are isolated from the scattered Rouman remnant on Pindos
and elsewhere. They represent that part of the inhabitants of the
peninsula which became Latin, while the Greeks remained Greek, and the
Illyrians remained barbarian. Their lands, Moesia, Thrace specially so
called, and Dacia, were added to the empire at various times from
Augustus to Trajan. That they should gradually adopt the Latin language
is in no sort wonderful. Their position with regard to Rome was exactly
the same as that of Gaul and Spain. Where Greek civilization had been
firmly established, Latin could nowhere displace it. Where Greek
civilization was unknown, Latin overcame the barbarian tongue. It would
naturally do so in this part of the East exactly as it did in the
West.[5]
Here then we have in the Southeastern peninsula three nations which have
all lived on to all appearances from the very beginnings of European
history, three distinct nations, speaking three distinct languages. We
have nothing answering to this in the West. It needs no proof that the
speakers of Celtic and Basque in Gaul and in Spain do not hold the same
position in Western Europe which the Greeks, Albanians, and Roumans do
in Eastern Europe. In the East the most ancient inhabitants of the land
are still there, not as scraps or survivals, not as fragments of nations
lingering on in corners, but as nations in the strictest sense, nations
whose national being forms an element in every modern and political
question. They all have their memories, their grievances, and their
hopes; and their memories, their grievances, and their hopes are all of
a practical and political kind. Highlanders, Welshmen, Bretons, French
Basques, whatever we say of the Spanish brethren, have doubtless
memories, but they have hardly political grievances or hopes. Ireland
may have political grievances; it certainly has political hopes; but
they are not exactly of the same kind as the grievances or hopes of the
Greek, the Albanian, and the Rouman. Let Home Rule succeed to the extent
of setting up an independent king and parliament of Ireland, yet the
language and civilization of that king and parliament would still be
English. Ireland would form an English state, politically hostile, it
may be, to Great Britain, but still an English state. No Greek,
Albanian, or Rouman state would be in the same way either Turkish or
Austrian.
On these primitive and abiding races came, as on other parts of Europe,
the Roman conquest. That conquest planted Latin colonies on the
Dalmatian coast, where the Latin tongue still remains in its Italian
variety as the speech of literature and city life; it Romanized one
great part of the earlier inhabitants; it had the great political effect
of all, that of planting the Roman power in a Greek city, and thereby
creating a state, and in the end a nation, which was Roman on one side,
and Greek on the other. Then came the Wandering of the Nations, on
which, as regards men of our own race, we need not dwell. The Goths
marched at will through the Eastern Empire; but no Teutonic settlement
was ever made within its bounds, no lasting Teutonic settlement was ever
made even on its border. The part of the Teuton in the West was played,
far less perfectly indeed, by the Slav in the East. He is there what the
Teuton is here, the great representative of what we may call the modern
European races, those whose part in history began after the
establishment of the Rouman power. The differences between the position
of the two races are chiefly these. The Slav in the East has præ-Roman
races standing alongside of him in a way in which the Teuton has not in
the West. On the Greeks and Albanians he has had but little influence;
on the Rouman and his language his influence has been far greater, but
hardly so great as the influence of the Teuton on the Romance nations
and languages of Western Europe. The Slav too stands alongside of races
which have come in since his own coming, in a way in which the Teuton in
the West is still further from doing. That is to say, besides Greeks,
Albanians, and Roumans, he stands alongside of Bulgarians, Magyars, and
Turks, who have nothing to answer to them in the West. The Slav, in the
time of his coming, in the nature of his settlement, answers roughly to
the Teuton; his position is what that of the Teuton would be, if Western
Europe had been brought under the power of an alien race at some time
later than his own settlement. The Slavs undoubtedly form the greatest
element in the population of the Eastern peninsula, and they once
reached more widely still. Taking the Slavonic name in its widest
meaning, they occupy all the lands from the Danube and its great
tributaries southward to the strictly Greek border. The exceptions are
where earlier races remain, Greek or Italian on the coast-line, Albanian
in the mountains. The Slavs hold the heart of the peninsula, and they
hold more than the peninsula itself. The Slav lives equally on both
sides of what is or was the frontier of the Austrian and Ottoman
empires; indeed, but for another set of causes which have effected
Eastern Europe, the Slav might have reached uninterruptedly from the
Baltic to the Ægæan.
This last set of causes are those which specially distinguish the
histories of Eastern and of Western Europe; a set of causes which,
though exactly twelve hundred years old,[6] are still fresh and living,
and which are the special causes which have aggravated the special
difficulties of the last five hundred years. In Western Europe, though
we have had plenty of political conquests, we have had no national
migrations since the days of the Teutonic settlements--at least, if we
may extend these last so as to take in the Scandinavian settlements in
Britain and Gaul. The Teuton has pressed to the East at the expense of
the Slav and the Old-Prussian: the borders between the Romance and the
Teutonic nations in the West have fluctuated; but no third set of
nations has come in, strange alike to the Roman and the Teuton and to
the whole Aryan family. As the Huns of Attila showed themselves in
Western Europe as passing ravagers, so did the Magyars at a later day;
so did the Ottoman Turks in a day later still, when they besieged Vienna
and laid waste the Venetian mainland. But all these Turanian invaders
appeared in Western Europe simply as passing invaders; in Eastern Europe
their part has been widely different. Besides the temporary dominion of
Avars, Patzinaks, Chazars, Cumans, and a crowd of others, three bodies
of more abiding settlers, the Bulgarians, the Magyars, and the Mongol
conquerors of Russia, have come in by one path; a fourth, the Ottoman
Turks, have come in by another path. Among all these invasions we have
one case of thorough assimilation, and only one. The original Finnish
Bulgarians have, like Western conquerors, been lost among Slavonic
subjects and neighbors. The geographical function of the Magyar has been
to keep the two great groups of Slavonic nations apart. To his coming,
more than to any other cause, we may attribute the great historical gap
which separates the Slav of the Baltic from his southern kinsfolk. The
work of the Ottoman Turk we all know. These latter settlers remain
alongside of the Slav, just as the Slav remains alongside of the earlier
settlers. The Slavonized Bulgarians are the only instance of
assimilation such as we are used to in the West. All the other races,
old and new, from the Albanian to the Ottoman, are still there, each
keeping its national being and its national speech. And in one part of
the ancient Dacia we must add quite a distinct element, the element of
Teutonic occupation in a form unlike any in which we see it in the West,
in the shape of the Saxons of Transsilvania.
We have thus worked out our point in detail. While in each Western
country some one of the various races which have settled in it has,
speaking roughly, assimilated the others, in the lands which are left
under the rule of the Turk, or which have been lately delivered from his
rule, all the races that have ever settled in the country still abide
side by side. So when we pass into the lands which form the
Austro-Hungarian monarchy, we find that that composite dominion is just
as much opposed as the dominion of the Turk is to those ideas of
nationality toward which Western Europe has been long feeling its way.
We have seen by the example of Switzerland that it is possible to make
an artificial nation out of fragments which have split off from three
several nations. But the Austro-Hungarian monarchy is not a nation, not
even an artificial nation of this kind. Its elements are not bound
together in the same way as the three elements of the Swiss
Confederation. It does indeed contain one whole nation in the form of
the Magyars: we might say that it contains two, if we reckon the Czechs
for a distinct nation. Of its other elements, we may for the moment set
aside those parts of Germany which are so strangely united with the
crowns of Hungary and Dalmatia. In those parts of the monarchy which
come within the more strictly Eastern lands--the _Roman_ and the
_Rouman_,--we may so distinguish the Romance-speaking inhabitants of
Dalmatia and the Romance-speaking inhabitants of Transsilvania. The Slav
of the north and of the south, the Magyar conqueror, the Saxon
immigrant, all abide as distinct races. That the Ottoman is not to be
added to our list in Hungary, while he is to be added in lands farther
south, is simply because he has been driven out of Hungary, while he is
allowed to abide in lands farther south. No point is more important to
insist on now than the fact that the Ottoman once held the greater part
of Hungary by exactly the same right, the right of the strongest, as
that by which he still holds Macedonia and Epeiros. It is simply the
result of a century of warfare, from Sobieski to Joseph the Second,
which fixed the boundary which only yesterday seemed eternal to
diplomatists, but which now seems to have vanished. That boundary has
advanced and gone back over and over again. As Buda once was Turkish,
Belgrade has more than once been Austrian. The whole of the southeastern
lands, Austrian, Turkish, and independent, from the Carpathian Mountains
southward, present the same characteristic of permanence and
distinctness among the several races which occupy them. The several
races may lie, here in large continuous masses, there in small detached
settlements; but there they all are in their distinctness. There is
among them plenty of living and active national feeling; but while in
the West political arrangements for the most part follow the great lines
of national feeling, in the East the only way in which national feeling
can show itself is by protesting, whether in arms or otherwise,
against existing political arrangements. Save the Magyars alone, the
ruling race in the Hungarian kingdom, there is no case in those lands in
which the whole continuous territory inhabited by speakers of the same
tongue is placed under a separate national government of its own. And,
even in this case, the identity between nation and government is
imperfect in two ways. It is imperfect, because, after all, though
Hungary has a separate national government in internal matters, yet it
is not the Hungarian kingdom, but the Austro-Hungarian monarchy of which
it forms a part, which counts as a power among the other powers of
Europe. And the national character of the Hungarian government is
equally imperfect from the other side. It is national as regards the
Magyar; it is not national as regards the Slav, the Saxon, and the
Rouman. Since the liberation of part of Bulgaria, no whole European
nation is under the rule of the Turk. No one nation of the Southeast
peninsula forms a single national government. One fragment of a nation
is free under a national government, another fragment is ruled by
civilized strangers, a third is trampled down by barbarians. The
existing states of Greece, Roumania, and Servia are far from taking in
the whole of the Greek, Rouman, and Servian nations. In all these lands,
Austrian, Turkish, and independent, there is no difficulty in marking
off the several nations; only in no case do the nations answer to any
existing political power.
In all these cases, where nationality and government are altogether
divorced, language becomes yet more distinctly the test of nationality
than it is in Western lands where nationality, and government do to
some extent coincide. And when nationality and language do not coincide
in the East, it is owing to another cause, of which also we know nothing
in the West. In many cases religion takes the place of nationality; or
rather the ideas of religion and nationality can hardly be
distinguished. In the West a man's nationality is in no way affected by
the religion which he professes, or even by his change from one religion
to another. In the East it is otherwise. The Christian renegade who
embraces Islam becomes for most practical purposes a Turk. Even if, as
in Crete and Bosnia, he keeps his Greek or Slavonic language, he remains
Greek or Slav only in a secondary sense. For the first principle of the
Mahometan religion, the lordship of the true believer over the infidel,
cuts off the possibility of any true national fellowship between the
true believer and the infidel. Even the Greek or Armenian who embraces
the Latin creed goes far toward parting with his nationality as well as
with his religion. For the adoption of the Latin creed implies what is
in some sort the adoption of a new allegiance, the accepting of the
authority of the Roman Bishop. In the Armenian indeed we are come very
near to the phenomena of the further East, where names like Parsee and
Hindoo, names in themselves as strictly ethnical as Englishman or
Frenchman, have come to express distinctions in which religion and
nationality are absolutely the same thing. Of this whole class of
phenomena the Jew is of course the crowning example. But we speak of
these matters here only as bringing in an element in the definition of
nationality to which we are unused in the West. But it quite comes
within our present subject to give one definition from the Southeastern
lands. What is the Greek? Clearly he who is at once a Greek in speech
and Orthodox in faith. The Hellenic Mussulmans in Crete, even the
Hellenic Latins in some of the other islands, are at the most imperfect
members of the Hellenic body. The utmost that can be said is that they
keep the power of again entering that body, either by their own return
to the national faith, or by such a change in the state of things as
shall make difference in religion no longer inconsistent with true
national fellowship.
Thus, wherever we go, we find language to be the rough practical test of
nationality. The exceptions are many; they may perhaps outnumber the
instances which conform to the rule. Still they are exceptions.
Community of language does not imply community of blood; it might be
added that diversity of language does not imply diversity of blood. But
community of language is, in the absence of any evidence to the
contrary, a presumption of the community of blood, and it is proof of
something which for practical purposes is the same as community of
blood. To talk of "the Latin race," is in strictness absurd. We know
that the so-called race is simply made up of those nations which adopted
the Latin language. The Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic races may
conceivably have been formed by a like artificial process. But the
presumption is the other way; and if such a process ever took place, it
took place long before history began. The Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic
races come before us as groups of mankind marked out by the test of
language. Within those races separate nations are again marked out by a
stricter application of the test of language. Within the race we may
have languages which are clearly akin to each other, but which need not
be mutually intelligible. Within the nation we have only dialects which
are mutually intelligible, or which, at all events, gather round some
one central dialect which is intelligible to all. We take this standard
of races and nations, fully aware that it will not stand a physiological
test, but holding that for all practical purposes adoption must pass as
equivalent to natural descent. And, among the practical purposes which
are affected by the facts of race and nationality, we must, as long as a
man is what he is, as long as he has not been created afresh according
to some new scientific pattern, not shrink from reckoning those generous
emotions which, in the present state of European feeling, are beginning
to bind together the greater as well as the lesser groups of mankind.
The sympathies of men are beginning to reach wider than could have been
dreamed of a century ago. The feeling which was once confined to the
mere household extended itself to the tribe or the city. From the tribe
or city it extended itself to the nation; from the nation it is
beginning to extend itself to the whole race. In some cases it can
extend itself to the whole race far more easily than in others. In some
cases historical causes have made nations of the same race bitter
enemies, while they have made nations of different races friendly
allies. The same thing happened in earlier days between tribes and
cities of the same nation. But, when hindrances of this kind do not
exist, the feeling of race, as something beyond the narrower feeling of
nationality, is beginning to be a powerful agent in the feelings and
actions of men and of nations. A long series of mutual wrongs, conquest,
and oppression on one side, avenged by conquest and oppression on the
other side, have made the Slav of Poland and the Slav of Russia the
bitterest of enemies. No such hindrance exists to stop the flow of
natural and generous feeling between the Slav of Russia and the Slav of
the Southeastern lands. Those whose statesmanship consists in some
hand-to-mouth shift for the moment, whose wisdom consists in refusing to
look either back to the past or onward to the future, cannot understand
this great fact of our times; and what they cannot understand they mock
at. But the fact exists and does its work in spite of them. And it does
its work none the less because in some cases the feeling of sympathy is
awakened by a claim of kindred, where, in the sense of the physiologist
or the genealogist, there is no kindred at all. The practical view,
historical or political, will accept as members of this or that race or
nation many members whom the physiologist would shut out, whom the
English lawyer would shut out, but whom the Roman lawyer would gladly
welcome to every privilege of the stock on which they were grafted. The
line of the Scipios, of the Cæsars, and of the Antonines, was continued
by adoption; and for all practical purposes the nations of the earth
have agreed to follow the examples set them by their masters.
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE.
BORN 1809.
KIN BEYOND SEA[7]
BY WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE.
"When Love unites, wide space divides in vain,
And hands may clasp across the spreading main."
It is now nearly half a century since the works of De Tocqueville and De
Beaumont, founded upon personal observation, brought the institutions of
the United States effectually within the circle of European thought and
interest. They were co-operators, but not upon an equal scale. De
Beaumont belongs to the class of ordinary, though able, writers: De
Tocqueville was the Burke of his age, and his treatise upon America may
well be regarded as among the best books hitherto produced for the
political student of all times and countries.