R. G. Latham

“ Of the material conquerors of the world, of the disturbers of things physical by physical force, the Turks are the greatest: since what they have won has been by hardihood of will and strength of arm far less than by diplomacy or the more indirect effects of their arts and literature—of which, indeed, they have had none. But because they have been thus material, they have not been permanent. Had they conquered, like the ancient Romans, Egypt and Barbary and Servia and Persia and Hindustan would be Turk, giving an area greater than that of the Anglo-Saxons or the Slavonians. ”

“ Who so fit to be good Catholics as the favoured of the Pope, the authorized converters of the heathen Indians, and the people whose national life was a crusade against the Mahometan on their own soil? Who, too, so born to the pride of purity of blood? There is much to account for all this, with which descent has nothing to do, although, perhaps, there is more than the explanation of all this accounts for.
A ballad literature, rising to the level of the humbler epics, and a truly home-grown drama, are the self-evolved, indigenous elements of Spanish literature. ”

“ Or, perhaps, his views are limited to the criticism of a nation’s literature; in which case a foreign settlement, which gave nothing new to the speech of the people, to their arts, to their records, or to their mythology, would, to the historian of its literature, be no foreign settlement at all. The ethnologist is, to a certain degree, in the same position; but only to a certain degree. At any rate, however, the fact of an Egyptian element in the early Hellenic population is an important point in the ancient commerce of the Mediterranean, even if it be nothing more. ”

“ It may fairly be urged that conquests by sea are less complete and perfect than those by land; so that though they may be admitted as explanatory of settlements on the coast, they are insufficient to account for the reduction of the more inland and mountainous parts of a country. This is an objection as far as it goes: yet it would be hazardous to say that either Greece was more purely Hellenic, or Italy more exclusively Italian, at the beginning of their respective historical areas, than England was Anglo-Saxon in the reign of Alfred. Yet the Anglo-Saxon conquest was maritime. ”

“ From history we learn that all the ancient Spaniards were allied to the ancestors of the Basques, all Gaul to those of the Bretons, all England to those of the Welsh. Granted. But what does history tell us about Bavaria, Styria, the Valley of the Po, or Ancient Thrace? In all these parts the present population is known to be recent, and the older known next to not at all. The reconstruction of the original populations of such areas as these is one of the highest problems in ethnology. To what did they belong, an existing stock more widely extended than now, or a fresh stock altogether? ”

“ Now, if we are right in supposing the Ligurians to have been Kelts, the earliest historical occupants of Lombardy, Etruscans, and the Liburnians and Venetians members of a distinct stock, we have to go far towards the south before we find the population with which the ideas suggested by the term Italian are connected; before we find a language allied to the Latin, or before we find a civilization and polity akin to that of the Romans. ”

“ Rumelia, the province which first comes into notice is, the true and proper area of the Turks, Ottomans, or Osmanlis; a family which, considered in respect to European ethnology, is as unimportant from its numerical magnitude, as it is recent in respect to its introduction. Yet this is a fact which we are slow to perceive at first; since the Turkish empire is so great, that, unless we separate its ethnological from its political elements, we fail to realize the extent to which the Osmanlis are not only intrusive, but inconsiderable. ”

“ What should we say to the writer who, in the reign of Queen Victoria, should say that the only people of England who took no part in the wars of the Saxons against the Britons were the Cornishmen? Surely we should accuse him of an anachronism, and suggest the fact of his Cornishmen having been at the time in question, no Saxons at all, but Britons. The same reason applies to the statements concerning the Acarnanians; inasmuch as it is highly probable that they are absent from the Homeric list of Greeks, because they were other than Greek in respect to their nationality. ”

“ In their original country they are far removed from the contact of any literature or science better than their own; for what are the models for the Turk of Independent Tartary? In the country of their conquests they have clever Greeks and Arabs to do their head-work for them. And we may add to these drawbacks, the unfavourable effects of their creed. The language that gave them the Koran can give them nothing useful for the Europe of the nineteenth century; whilst the Europe of the nineteenth century is, in their eyes, a Europe of infidels. ”

“ Hence, the Skipetar are a nation of Highlanders, more so than any other population of Europe, since the Basques of the Pyrenees are inconsiderable in area, and the Swiss are divided between the Germans, the French, the Roman, and the Italian families. They lie, too, more to the south than any other mountaineers, and it is not very fanciful to imagine that if they were Lowlanders, their skin and hair would approach that of the Greeks, with some of whom they lie under the same parallel. ”

“ Writers, speakers, journalists, and orators, Ribbonmen and Orangemen, who neither know nor care much about the Natural History of Man, talk about the Keltic stock, or the Keltic race, with a boldness and fluency that, except in the case of the antagonist term Anglo-Saxon, we meet with nowhere else. To read some of the dissertations on Irish misgovernment, or Welsh dissent, one might fancy that an American of Pennsylvania was writing about the aboriginal Indians, or the enslaved negroes—so much is there made of race, and so familiar are even the non-ethnological part of the world with the term. ”

“ No part of Europe lies between the Tropics; so that the luxuriance of a spontaneous and varied vegetation, with its pernicious tendencies to incline the habits of its population to idleness, is wanting. The rank and rapid growth of the plants which serve as food to men and animals, and which dispense with labour, nowhere occurs.
b. No part comes under the class of Steppes; or, at most, but imperfectly approaches their character. In Asia, the vast table-lands of the centre, occupied by the Turks and Mongols, have ever been the cradle of an active, locomotive, hungry, and aggressive population. ”

“ If the Welsh were to reconquer England, or the Frisians Germany, the phenomenon which I imagine to have been presented by the history of Rome would be repeated. A people conquered up to a certain point react on their conquerors, vanquish them, and a fourth of the world besides. ”

“ That a Ugrian population extended as far southward and westward as the Elbe is a doctrine that may be maintained without going to the full recognition of the so-called Finnic hypothesis; which carries the populations akin to the Ugrian as far south as the Pyrenees, and sees in the Basques of Biscay and the Lapps of Lapland, the fragments of a vast population once continuous, but, subsequently, broken up and displaced by the Keltic and Germanic occupancies of Gaul and Germany respectively. ”

“ By which I mean that, if, by the term Greece we denote the present kingdom of King Otho, irrespective of its population, and with a view only to the portion of the earth’s surface that it constitutes, the Hellenes will come out Greek, just as the Anglo-Saxons are British, i.e., not at all. Instead of this, the true and primitive Greeks will be the analogues of the now extinct or modified Britons of Kent and Northumberland, the Hellenes being those of the Angle, Frisian, and other Germanic conquerors of our island. ”

“ Then comes the Lithuanian question; upon which the reasoning is far more elaborate; consisting chiefly in the exposition of an undoubted fact, and the suggestion of a new interpretation of it. No two parts of the world are so distant but what they may illustrate each other’s ethnology; and, in the present case, the ancient geography of Kherson and the Crimea is explained by that of Persia, Cabul, and Hindostan.
It has long been known that the ancient, sacred, and literary language of Northern India has its closest grammatical affinities in Europe. ”

“ Prussia.—The kingdom of Prussia well illustrates the difficulty of making ethnology and politics agree. It falls into two parts separated from each other. Of these the first, with the possible exception of its south-western corner, was wholly Sarmatian in the tenth century; as Sarmatian as England was Keltic, or Spain Iberic. The population, too, was referable to both branches of the Sarmatian stock—the Slavonic as well as the Lithuanic.
In East Prussia it is easily seen that the geographical names are not German. Neither are they Russian. ”

“ Now I have great doubts about the superior civilization of the conquerors of Burgundy, Alsatia, and Franche-Comté; but these arise from a view, perhaps, peculiar to myself, of the nature of the Frank confederacies. I believe the word Frank to have distinguished the Germans who were independent of Rome from those who were in allegiance to the empire, and, consequently, that it might be borne by different divisions of the German stock, and by wholly unconnected alliances. ”

“ If the remote ancestors of the Greeks and the remote ancestors of the Turks be referable to some common parentage, it is mere verbiage to refer the differences between them to race, as an ultimate and primary cause. ”

“ WITHOUT asking too minutely what are the real boundaries of Europe on its eastern side, we shall find it convenient to carry them as far as the Volga and the Ural Mountains; by doing which we include the Government of the Don Kosaks, Astrakan, Orenburg, Perm, Vologda, and the whole of Arkhangel. This is being inordinately liberal; but it is as well to be so, because three divisions of the population of European Russia are common to the two continents ”

“ Like any other fact, however isolated, it sets aside the current notion of the unfitness of the Turk for regular and industrial labour; a habitude, which, like so many other points of ethnology, is connected with external circumstances far more than blood, pedigree, or race.
The intellectual development of the Turk stock in general has been that of the majority of the families of mankind—moderate, or less than moderate; for invention and originality are the exceptions rather than the rule. ”

“ Sometimes the language, religion, laws, and habits of the conquerors were adopted by the conquered. This was a loss of characteristics. So far greater than the influences of all the other populations of Europe have been those of the Germans and the Romans (to which, for the eastern part of the continent, we must add the Turks) , that for nearly half Europe, whenever the question will be one of great intermixture, the basis will be Keltic, Iberic, or Sarmatian as the case may be, with Romans or Germans for the source of the superadded elements. ”

“ In Livonia, or Lief-land, the oldest population was Lief; and the Liefs were Ugrians. A few only now remain. The first displacement was at the hands of the Lithuanian Letts, who are, at present, the chief population; themselves becoming, day by day, more and more Germanized—and, when not German, Slavonic.
Here, as in Finland, though in a less degree, there is a Swedish intermixture; indeed in one of the small islands of the Oesel Archipelago, the Isle of Worms, the population is Swede. In the Isle of Aaland it is Swedish, with a Ugrian basis. ”

“ At the downfall of the Roman Empire, Sicily seems to have been Greek in speech, and Sikelo-Sikanian, strongly crossed with Greek, in blood. Then came the piracies of Genseric and his Vandals; then the invasion of the Goths of Theodoric; then the island is reconquered by Belisarius as a general of the Eastern empire; none of which events were of much ethnological importance. Not so the events of the ninth century. The Arab conquest was a physical as well as a moral influence. ”

“ Now, in considering the heroic age of Tshekh literature, Schaffarik himself, though firmly holding the doctrine of a previous Germanic population, remarks, that “there is no trace of any remnant of the German spirit having survived in Bohemia. The remains of such Germanic population as there were, must have been a weak remnant, and soon have become lost in the Slavonic nationality. Even the stronger most probably withdrew to the lonely hills.” ”

“ AS a general rule the Germanic, or Gothic, stock has not only held its own area from the earliest time, but has encroached on that of others, so that although there are many parts of Europe, which, once the occupancy of non-Germanic populations, have now become more or less German, the converse rarely, if ever, can be shown to have taken place. ”