H. J. Fleure

“ And all through the process of evolution of races, of language and religion and of industry, we may follow the social life of the European peoples and the development of its organization and its expression in response to those processes of evolution. We must see at the same time how it both affects and reflects alterations which are always occurring in the European environment through changes of climate, rising and sinking of the land, clearing of forests and draining of swamps by mankind, development of communications, and other results of the labour of man. ”

“ The new League of Nations movement is an evidence of development of the same line of thought among the thinkers of the Continent, and is slowly gathering momentum through the creation of institutions with laws for their guidance, and the promise of the growth of a body of lawyers as interested to maintain those institutions as the lawyers of the nation-states have been to maintain that form of organization. The League has had to take up the question of the relations of Europe to distant lands, and has stood for a principle of trusteeship, the fate of which is trembling in the balance. ”

“ In our changeful continent we may thus follow out one of the most varied and perilous of the stories of men, a story of hardly-won triumph over serious obstacles, triumph maintained for a while in the face of serious threats that never ceased. It is a story that leads us to the appreciation of Europe's precarious position of industrial and administrative leadership, with its implications of conflict and unsettlement that make our Chinese friends think of us as the White Peril. ”

“ Thus, though Germany was experiencing the same cityward drift of people as Britain, her agriculture remained in a far stronger position than ours, and with that went the probability of better maintenance of the quality of the people. The wasting of resources on war, the distrust created by aggressive intrigues, the loss of territory and minerals, and the loss of health of the people through the blockade, all imply changes in the situation of the German people, the consequences of which it is difficult to foresee. ”

“ We may study the languages and religions of European peoples and see that in the days before writing and markets became features of local life, languages changed, albeit slowly, spreading in waves of civilization, with only a subordinate relation to the waves of racial type. And if languages spread in waves of civilization, this has been the case still more in matters of religion, though folk tradition has a remarkable power of resurgence that leads to the local adaptation of religious movements time after time. ”

“ For the purposes of this sketch it is not necessary to go into great detail about the Roman efforts, but we should note that within the bounds of their Empire they spread wheat cultivation, road communications, and their legal system, and that along with this seems to have gone a cheapening of iron. All these changes helped to knit the people to the soil, to make neighbourhood take the place of kinship as a basis of association, to root a language in the people's hearts. ”

“ The Baltic or Lettic and the Celtic languages are in essentials survivals of antiquity, of great interest and value as preserving elements which would otherwise have been lost by process of time, but of uncertain future, for no man can say to what extent they are likely to be spoken a few centuries hence. It is otherwise with the Romance, Teutonic, and Slavonic families of languages; they are the definite possessions of the peoples of various regions for centuries to come, and it will be well for us to try to realize how this has come to pass. ”

“ In the nineteenth century long and vain attempts were made by autocratic Russia to work in double harness with Finland, which belonged so markedly to Western Europe by tradition, had seceded from the Roman Church and become Protestant at the Great Schism, and was feeling, along with Western Europe, the nationalist revival with its literary movement attempting in this case to perpetuate Finnish and develop it as a culture language. As in some other northern regions (notably Norway) the aristocracy merged itself in the people, and became the leader-element in trade and commerce. ”

“ For the present, however, the fashionable power is oil, of which, so far as is known, Britain has only a very little, and in which the whole of Western Europe is also poor. But oil is rather easily transportable, and Western Europe's powers of transport are being used to exploit sources of oil in such places as are not already in the sphere of influence of the United States of America. However this may be disguised, it is none the less an indication of Europe's increasing dependence on other regions for what her industry needs. ”

“ This does not mean the destruction of patriotism, but rather its ennoblement into a passion for the well-being and the health of future generations of the people, for the enrichment of each heritage of language, literature, tradition, and art by active effort, and for the growth of that toleration which is the accompaniment of self-control and its attendant liberty and peace. ”

“ With their organization based upon skill and patience, the peoples of Central Europe may well go on developing, perhaps even exploiting, the Russian and Turanian lands on their eastern flank, as these latter do not seem likely to become industrial for some time. On the other hand, a Sino-Japanese development of industry on a large scale is always possible, and, if wisely managed, should have the benefit of the skill, taste, and honesty of the Chinese merchant as well as of the skilful industry of the Chinese workman, whose frugality and cheerfulness would make him a formidable competitor. ”

“ The line along which the hill masses of Central Europe grade down into the European plain that stretches from Ypres to the Urals is marked out in many ways in European life. Not far from it is the main line of European coalfields, a most momentous factor for modern times. It is a line of exchange towns of ancient renown. Near it is a belt of loess, that is of loose wind-blown material laid there in the interglacial phases of the Ice Age, so fine grained that it does not encourage and has never encouraged tree growth, though it is valuable for cultivation. ”

“ Broadly we may say that our latitude has made a really self-dependent agriculture almost an impossibility for Europe, and we note in illustration that Bohemia is suffering sadly because foreign fertilizers could not be imported in 1914-18. The problem of diminishing fertility has made itself insistent again and again in European life, and has proved a goad to drive men to agricultural experiment on the one hand and to trade as a supplementary source of wealth on the other. ”

“ So traditional cultivation on lands owned or worked in common by the villagers was ever under threat of disruption, and doubtless the severities of climate and plague in the fourteenth century contributed their quota to the disintegration of the old mode of life. The complaint of diminished fertility made itself heard far and wide, and the end of the Middle Ages witnessed the breakdown of the old village system in the west. Trade and the voyages of discovery furnished supplementary sources of wealth, and the beginnings of larger industry grew out of this. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The system of the manor under which the villagers give service to a military protector is too easily mixed up with the village system in discussions. The manor, with complex origins, is characteristic of post-Roman days of movement and strife. The civilizing element promoting agriculture and the law is furnished by the Church, which, with the centuries, spread its work over the Rhine, beyond the bounds of the Empire, right away to the limits of Europe-of-the-Sea, that is of the lands near Baltic or Mediterranean, or west of a north-south line near the east ends of those seas. ”

“ The improbability of any renewal of effective pressure from Asia on the now so highly armed west of Europe did away with the raison d'être of Vienna as a city of camp and court, and it will require a higher development of European unity to make Vienna take its definitive place as the nerve centre of the Continent's land-communications. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is actual pressing need of a routine of tradition on which to fall back in these times of stress. There is also the fear of the grassland tribes tending to keep the people organized on a traditional basis as war leaders and labourers, while the distance from the sea diminishes trade and the middle class, and helps to maintain localism, which in its turn strengthens routine. There we thus find typically a middle class largely immigrant and alien to the military and labouring classes, and this further complicates the problems of social development and organization. ”

“ With all this new power and also the development of armaments, Europe found herself in a position to exploit the other parts of the earth inhabited by other races less well equipped. They gradually, nay almost suddenly, became the producers of raw materials, food-stuffs, and fertilizers for the vastly increasing populations of industrial Europe, which began to teem in the manufacturing cities when coal and steam machinery were added to the European equipment. ”

“ 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 net result of a study of these lines is to show that the French people, apart from the German borderland, consist of two cultural elements, a southern with Roman survivals in cities, language, &c., and a more northern one which is much less Roman. Between them is an intermediate area with mixed allegiance. The study of such a set of boundaries can be given a special value, for it shows us that the linear boundary, however necessary it may be under our outworn system of aggressive states in politics, is an artificiality when applied to the study of peoples. ”

“ The climate of the Russian plain largely inhibits the higher grades of intellectual activity during the seasons of severe {68} cold and heat, with the result that those whose circumstances do not give them artificial protection from the weather must depend to a large extent on routine for the continuance of social organization. Conditions are thus not favourable for development of a complex unity over a wide area, and localism is therefore the prevailing tendency, carrying with it probabilities of maintenance and even of development of dialect-differences rather than of linguistic unification. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Russian plain beyond the Pripet Marshes is, on the other hand, subject to painful extremes which seriously limit man's efficiency in both winter and summer, and leave him but short periods in spring and autumn for effective freshness and enterprise. In consequence of this, Western Europe, or we may call it Europe-of-the-Sea, shows continuity of activity through the changing seasons, a continuity of thought and criticism which has exercised a powerful influence on government and social order, while the sea, as above suggested, has promoted contacts and kept things moving. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The latitude of most of Europe is such that the sun's rays strike the soil too obliquely to act chemically upon it with sufficient rapidity to decompose fresh material for plant growth as fast as plants use it up. In the Mediterranean {8} region this is hardly the case, but in several parts the soil possibilities are very indifferent, so that our contrast is more between Europe and the Tropics than between north and south in Europe, though it is a valuable clue to many of the differences between the German plain and the Paris basin. ”

“ Among the Germans the background of industrial development was very different from that which we have noted in Britain. Where the river valleys leave the hills for the northern plain are old cities of great dignity and fame, and though they were somewhat decadent after the decay of the Hanse, they were strong enough to keep their common lands and their tradition of city government from the Middle Ages. Coal was found along this zone, and it became industrialized, but the new movement had to respect the cities, which grew often on public land. ”