ARMS AND THE MAP ARMS AND THE MAP- A STUDY OF NATIONALITIES AND FRONTIERS IAN C. HANNAH, M.A. (d. c. l. vind.) FORMERLY PRESIDENT OF KING'S COLLEGE, NOVA SCOTIA AUTHOR OF "eastern ASIA: A HISTORY," ETC. LONDON T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD. ADELPHI TERRACE First Published in 1915 [All rights nservtd] PREFACE While we look back with some envy to the comparatively humane war methods of Attila and Tamerlane, we are all praying for a Europe in the future less like a powder magazine than the Europe of the present and the past. Much may possibly be done if disputed provinces and Irredentist lands are assigned with some regard both to the true nationahty and the actual wishes of their own people. Much, but we may hardly hope for all. There must be a wholly new spirit in the land if peace is really to be safe. H. W. Massingham (in the Daily News of 14th September, 1914) does well to point out : " Nationality alone will not save Europe. It may destroy it." H. N. Brailsford and others have said the same. There might be a real danger of what Eenan once called ** zoological wars." My object in writing this Httle work is not to make any prophecies, still less to air any uninformed opinions of my own, but rather to vi PREFACE give in a broad and general way the more obvious facts which it is right to know when considering the possible form of the new map. While avoiding intricate detail, I have tried to indicate all the important cases in Europe where the bulk of the population of a district is of another race than that of the rulers of the land, I have included the whole con- tinent and spoken of the colonising methods of all the nations for the sake of complete- ness, though it is probable that some of the countries will not be drawn into the war. I am not without hopes that the work may be found of some service to schools or to general students of historical geography who desire a iext-book more recent and less detailed than Freeman's well-known work. I have included no more history than seemed necessary for a brief study of the evolution of the different nationalities of the Continent, whether politically independent or not. And I have striven above all to be readable. The importance of recognising national aspirations can hardly be exaggerated. No small part of European unrest during the nineteenth century may be traced to the PREFACE vii cynical way in which the Congress of Vienna (1814) ignored everything but the wishes of the different princes. That mistake, let us hope, can never be repeated. One shudders to think of the time that will probably be required to discuss even the general prin- ciples of the extremely numerous and most tangled problems that must be settled by the Treaty of Peace. All the great European wars since the Re- naissance have had their origins, to some extent, in disputes about subjects that were world-wide. It is common to speak of the Anglo-French struggles during the eighteenth century as " colonial wars." This is true in the sense that by far the most important questions they settled did concern lands across the seas, but it is hardly true to say that those who fought and those who nego- tiated attached most importance to things so far away, at any rate till the coming of Pitt. It is otherwise to-day. Few will dispute the fact that the present struggle was at least predominantly ** made in Germany " with the chief aim of gaining wide areas over the viii PEEPACB seas where Teutonic emigrants could build new fatherlands as some counterpoise to the Empires of Britain and France. Hence a considerable part of the last chapter is devoted to German colonisation. A very full account of the subject is given in ** Map of Europe by Treaty since the General Peace of 1814," by Edward Hertslet (4 vols. : 1875, Butterworths). If God see fit to entrust any considerable share in redrawing that map once more to the British, we shall do well to remember the praiseworthy custom of Harald of the Fair Hair (p. 193), who ** whensoever swift rage or anger fell on him, held himself aback at first and let the wrath run off him, and looked at the matter un- wrathfuUy.'' I have done my best to avoid mistakes, but if any reader should detect any errors I should count it a very real kindness to have my attention drawn to them that they may be amended in the second edition. I. C. H. Fernroyd, Forest Bow. CONTENTS CHAP. Preface . . . . FADE V I. The Gebman Empire . . 11 II. France . 33 III. The Low Countries . , 44 IV. The British Isles , 59 V. The Eussian Empire . , 83 VI. The Balkan States . . 102 VII. The Austrian Empire , 125 VIII. Italy , 148 IX. Turkey . . . , , 160 X. Greece . . . . , 178 XI. Scandinavia 193 XII. Switzerland 202 XIII. The Hispanian Peninsula . 208 XIV. The Expansion of Europe , 217 Index 258 ARMS AND THE MAP CHAPTER I GERMANY The whole story of how the German lands were torn throughout mediasval days, and indeed still so remain, is very closely asso- ciated with the Holy Roman Empire, that glorious failure that stands the central fact of the history of the European middle ages. So vivid an impression on the mind of the Western World had been made by Imperial Rome that it seemed impossible for Europe to do without a suzerain power, and when on Christmas Day, 800, Charles the Great (or Charlemagne) was crowned at Rome, the Empire was in a measure restored. It lasted for a thousand years. It changed the history 12 AEMS AND THE MAP of the world. It directly created the conditions '(^np of whicli, has come the Great Mad War. : ; .TjhB mecjiaeval theory of empire is well expressed in the famous painting at Santa Maria Novella at Florence on the east wall of the Spanish Chapel, a work of the mid-four- teenth century. Side by side on a double throne sit Emperor and Pope together — the former supported by kings, princes, dukes, lawyers, knights, pilgrims, artisans and beggars, all the officials of the feudal system and those under the temporal power ; the latter by cardinals, bishops, priests, deacons, monks and nuns, all the hierarchy of the mediaeval Church. Mankind as a flock of sheep sit obedient at the feet of the twin vicegerents of God. Behind them the Church Mihtant on earth ; above, the Church Triumphant in heaven. The same conceptions are set out in the ** De Monarchia " of Dante, the first great poUtical text-book of the modern world, but GERMANY 18 rather an epitaph than a prophecy. A uni- versal monarchy is necessary for the well- being of mankind, the Eoman nation alone may give an imperial suzerain to Christendom, but this supreme power is derived from God Himself, with no human agency between. Dante explains the need there is for a single state on earth in the following characteristic passage : ** To all the above arguments a memorable example bears witness. This is the condition of mortal affairs for which the Son of God waited in order to assume flesh for the salvation of man. For when we survey in our minds the ages and disposi- tions of men, from the transgression of our first forefathers, which was the beginning of all our errors, we shall not find a time when the world was at peace and quiet, save under CsBsar Augustus, who was a monarch in a state of perfect monarchy. But that the human race was then happy in the quiet of universal peace, all the historians and illustrious poets 14 AEMS AND THE MAP testify ; . . . and Paul calls that most happy state the fulness of days. Certainly the age and its circumstances were so arranged that no mystery of our happiness should be want- ing to the world. But in what fashion the earth has been moved from that time to this, so that the seamless vesture has been torn by the nails of avarice, we have read, and God grant that we could be beyond the reach of seeing. Oh, human race ! how many tem- pests, what ruin and wrong, art thou con- strained to endure, while thou makest of thyself a beast with many heads." * The results of the existence of this Empire were very great, though quite other than those designed. There never was a time when all Europe was really controlled or even seriously influenced by imperial power. Par of tener than working together for the common good the twin vicars were at each other's throats. They represented the two great * Translation by P. H. Wioksteed. GERMANY 16 antitheses of Europe ; for the popes usually belonged to the Latin south, the emperors nearly always to the Saxon north. Even in mediaeval times there was great confusion about the theory ; the sovereign is fre- quently called by the chroniclers merely the Emperor of Germany. But sometimes in rather unexpected places we find the scheme of the Empire displayed, as on the nave roof of Aberdeen Cathedral. One EngUshman, Richard, Earl of Cornwall, was elected, not actually emperor, but " Rex Alemanniae sive Romanorum " (a sort of locum tenens of the Empire.) He was brother of Henry III. Matthew Paris records how he was crowned at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) in 1257 with all the solemnity used of ancient days, and none was found to challenge his claim, a thing that had not happened within the memory of man. In later days Henry VIII. of England wished to be emperor, but was defeated by Charles V. (I. of Spain). 16 AEMS AND THE MAP The practical effect of the existence of the Empire was to prevent the building up of a national Germany. For the Empire was German in fact, though in theory any Christian could be its head. Thus Matthew Paris sets forth the Electors (there were but seven in later times) — the Archbishops of Koln (Cologne), Maintz (Mayence), and Trier (Treves), the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Dukes of Austria, Suabia, Poland, Saxony, Brunswick, Carin- thia, Meulent, and Brabant with Louvain, the Marquises of Brandenburg, Meissen and Miche (probably Metz : p. 27), and the Land- grave of Thuringia. Bohemia and Poland were Slavic States (pp. 129, 94) ; the other are all German or Netherland. The Golden Bull of 1356 recognised as Electors the three arch- bishops and the rulers of the Palatinate, Bohemia, Saxony, and Brandenburg. It was absolutely inevitable that he who would otherwise have been the German king GERMANY 17 was eternally straining his eyes to the south, dazzled by the brilliance of a sceptre that had to be bestowed in Rome. For to the Eternal City each emperor must go to be crowned for the third time, though none of the later ones did. Thus while the sovereign was engaged in rather fruitless efforts to reduce the free cities of Italy to the imperial obedience, the free cities of Germany were almost wholly left alone, and by organising the Hanseatic League they virtually set up a new sovereign State of their own. It is impossible to doubt that if the Ufe work of such great emperors as the Hohenstaufens had been bent to the consoKdation of the German nation their monument would remain to-day. Although the Empire could have no other capital than Rome, the chief German headquarters was the city of Aachen (p. 15), where the great Charles lies at rest in the very remarkable church of sixteen sides which he built,* and where the * That is, the surrounding aisle ; the loftier central 18 AEMS AND THE MAP emperors were crowned. It is this structure that has given to the town the French name of Aix-la-Chapelle, by which it is generally known. With its chief city on the very borders of the Netherlands, had not the conception of the Holy Eoman Empire turned the mind of the sovereign in other directions, medisDval Germany could hardly have failed to become a great maritime Power with a coast-line perhaps extending the whole way along the North Sea from Prance to the borders of Denmark. It could hardly have failed to take its place beside England and Prance as a great colonising Power during Eenais- sance days. And so there would not have arisen that Germany we know, a nation with a giant's strength kicking for what part is octagonal. The later Gothic quire and chapels which cling to the Romanesque rotunda seem strangely- incongruous in style ; the cross-chapel has the imperial eagle worked into the tracery of a great window. Some remains of the Palace of Charles are incorporated into the Rathaus (Town Hall). GERMANY 19 it cannot get with the violent impulses of a child. But the burden of the Empire was by no means the only reason why the Germans in their mainland country have had a career so different from that of the Teutonic colony planted in the island to the west. The English rivers helped to bind the land by trade and they led to no aHen soil ; the German rivers beckoned their people far outwards on almost every side and tended to associate them so closely with alien races as to form a serious centrifugal force. The lofty moun- tains at the source, and the low-lying mud flats by the mouth, of the Rhine equally gave their people an independent career of their own. In 1805 the Empire was dissolved by Napo- leon * (p. 126), but it had accompHshed for Germany its baneful work. Ruined by the ♦ Though even yet its titles continue. There are still ** Hereditary Barons of the Holy Koman Empire." B 2 20 ARMS AND THE MAP war of thirty years, weak and divided through the absence of a leader or of any central point, its south-west provinces, Elsass-Lothringen (Alsace-Lorraine), torn away by the mighty monarchy of Prance, the Fatherland could do almost nothing for itself, though numerous individual Germans sailed west and east in the vessels of the Dutch (p. 237). But Ger- many still dreamed of unity ; her children were told how, sleeping in a cave, his beard grown through the table top, sat the great Barbarossa, ready to spring forth at the country's direst need. In very dreary days for his unfortunate country Ernest Moritz Arndt, who lived for more than ninety years (1769 — 1860), not without a touch of conceit, wrote thus : — ** What is the German's Fatherland ? Come, name to me that far-spread land. So far as German language rings — And God Himself in Heaven sings German alone, — That, gallant German, call thine own ! " GEEMANY ?1 But the day seems still far away ; the lands of German speech beyond the present limits of the Empire — parts of Austria and Switzerland and Luxemburg — are certainly not very keen about political union with the rulers of Berlin. The Swiss would un- doubtedly resist to the death ; the other sections might possibly be willing to enter an Empire less dominated than at present by a militarism half foreign to the German mind. Arndt's contemporary Priedrich List (1789 — 1846) was also an early supporter of Pan- German ideals. He lived for some years in America and made considerable study of commercial problems, being perhaps the first to protest against the idea that the same tariff pohcy must be good for all States. '* Li order,'* he says, ** to allow freedom of trade to operate naturally the less advanced nations must first be raised by artificial measures to that stage of cultivation to which the English nation has been artificially 22 AEMS AND THE MAP elevated.'' * He did much to promote the estabhshment of the ZoUverein, or Customs Union of Germany, out of which in great measure the new Empire grew. It is noteworthy that while these men who dreamed dreams f and saw visions of a united Germany rehed chiefly on moral forces, the great statesman who did so much actually to achieve it. Prince Bismarck, with his ** Blood and Iron," was far more inclined to trust purely to material ones. George Bourdon (** The German Enigma," 1914) quotes an officer as remarking ** such and such a country may possess an army, but Germany is an army that possesses a country." Together Austria and Prussia had gone to * " National System of Political Economy," 1841. (It is very doubtful whether List would be in favour of Tariff Keform for England at the present day. The natural inference from his writings is rather that the country has reached the stage when Free Trade is desirable.) t In days when Voltaire could say that England ruled the sea, France the land, Germany the clouds. GERMANY 28 war with Denmark to seize Holstein, which is truly German, and also Schleswig, which is very largely Danish (p. 199), and to which they had no real right. Then they fought each other (1866), and Austria, for centuries the seat of the Empire under the Haps- burg * House, was thrust forth from Germany. A new Empire was set up under the leadership of a Power originally not German at all. The Teutonic knights (for whom Chaucer's knight had fought) had for centuries held the Christian frontier against the pagan Prussian and Lithuanian hordes. Then in 1525 a grand master, Albert of Brandenburg (of the Hohenzollern House, whose ancestor had left Nuremberg in 1417), became the Duke of Prussia, which took its place among the Christian States. In 1701 the House of Hohenzollern secured the royal title and * Habsburg may be more strictly accurate, but it seems an impossible English word. 24 AEMS AND THE MAP largely owing to the ability of its successive kings, greatly strengthened its position in Europe. During the Franco-German War (1871) in the Palace of Louis XIV. at Ver- sailles the King of Bavaria solemnly pro- claimed its representative the German Em- peror — ^not the Emperor of Germany — Kaiser Wilhelm I. Thus launched as it were on the field of battle, the Empire that was newly estab- lished that day has stood above all for military power — ^has to a great extent indeed set the pace for the furious, mad arming of Europe. But it must be remembered that militarism was forced on a people occupying the weakest strategic position on the Continent, open frontiers * and armed rivals on every side. Even so the soldiers' spirit is centred in a State which is only half German itself. Could * It is rather difficult for English to realise the great anxieties created for Germany by the absence of natural boundaries. GERMANY 25 they freely choose their own career, the great bulk of the people of the German Empire would almost certainly show themselves what their fathers were during mediaeval days, among the least military and the most com- mercial of the larger nations of Europe. The German Empire that we know em- braces most of the old German lands — most, but by no means all (p. 21). It also com- prises other soil. Near the three corners of its territory there are three areas that would probably rather be without the Empire than within : one is Scandinavian, one is Slavic, but the third is almost purely German, or at least it was so once. For the pure-blooded Germans are most markedly inferior to the much-mixed French, whether in absorbing alien races or in conciliating neighbouring States, or even in binding together different parts of their own land. Instead of a centra- lised nation whose furthest individuals turn to a great capital as to their own mother, 26 AEMS AND THE MAP Germany presents us with a federation of States, two or three of them distinctly incHned to be jealous of the leadership of a people in some ways rather alien in spirit, and also somewhat to resent the Government of the Empire being located in a town so far from the old German lands, a city that for the great majority of the population has hardly any associations * beyond what have been created by the services of the House of HohenzoUern. It is natural that Danish Schleswig should desire to return to its mother-land, still more that the small State of Denmark should yearn to get it back. The efforts of Germany to * The German Empire is a very strange example of a federal system in tliat the different States are in it on different terms. Bavaria even retains the right of having her own foreign representatives to do anything they can find that is not specially reserved by the Constitution to the Imperial Government. Prussia includes con- siderably more than half the area of the Empire (134,658 out of 208,780 square miles), her king is Emperor, and from Berlin, in the absence of a federal capital, the government of the whole Empire is carried on. GEEMANY 27 change the affections of the people have been mostly directed to the crushing of Danish feeling ; little has been done to give them any firm reason for desiring to be German. The large Polish area between Silesia and West Prussia, of which Posen is the principal town, inevitably feels far more sympathy with the torn country of Poland than with any other land ; although the attitude of their European masters has strangely led to many of the patriotic demonstrations of the Poles taking place on the free soil of America, whither so many of them have emigrated.* Elsass- Lothringen, though purely German lands of old (p. 16), had by 1871 become so French in feeling that Bismarck himself gravely doubted the wisdom of restoring them to the Fatherland. f Even as German provinces * But as is natural and right, the Transatlantic Poles soon become enthusiastic Americans. t The small Alsatian territory of Belfort was, however, left to France. This area and also the district by Metz have long been entirely French in feeling and in speech. Both were formally acquired by the Bourbons in 1648. 28 AEMS AND THE MAP they have not inappropriately been known as Alsace-Lorraine to the world of English speech, despite the fact that Elsass has always been chiefly German in language.* German methods of attempting to assimi- late all aHen peoples have had about them far too much of Bismarck's " blood and iron/' too little of human kindness. Instead of inviting their new subjects to share in the glorious traditions of Germany, instead of showing more of the sterling and really lovable qualities of the German character, the rulers of Berlin have perversely been disposed to rely mainly on a mere display of power. Efforts are made forcibly to introduce Teutonic insti- tutions and (where necessary) the German language, and to forbid the use of any other in the schools, but the result is often to make the people more disposed than ever to main- tain the traditions of their fathers. Where * A good many of their people emigrated to France after 1871 ; German settlers came to take their places. GERMANY 39 school and home are in conflict the former can hardly prevail. The French in similar circumstances would explain what might be hoped if the people they were dealing with became French ; the Germans are more apt to enlarge on what will be the consequence if they do not become German. The Alsatians, or some of them, were not really very strongly devoted to France, by whose people they had often been ridiculed. A little more human sympathy might well have turned them into patriotic Germans, but the opportunity was hopelessly lost. On their eastern borders, especially in the Prussian part of Poland, the district of Posen, the rulers of Germany, perturbed by the great growth of Slavic population (mainly on account of its natural rate of increase being far higher than that of the Teutons), besides efforts to impose German on the schools, have attempted since 1886 by a system of land purchase to introduce German settlers 30 AEMS AND THE MAP in place of Poles and other Slavs. This has, however, had comparatively little success, as the new settlers find it hard to maintain their position and often are glad enough to surrender the land to its former owners. Despite a drastic Expropriation Act, carried in 1908, more land is PoKsh-owned than when colonisation began. The extraordinary progress of Germany in all that pertains to manufactures and com- merce, the careful social regulation of the whole nation and the almost entire absence of those slum areas that are England's great reproach, her contribution to knowledge in every form, her love of order and many other things of the same kind, all this cannot be too highly praised ; Europe would be incompar- ably poorer than she is without what Germans have done, but nevertheless Germany is very weak where her western neighbour is very strong. Germans as a rule are disliked by those across their frontiers, especially by the GERMANY 31 little States ; they have shown themselves markedly unable to win over Poles or Danes or even their own children who have come under the spell of France. And the little German Duchy of Luxemburg itself, in its sympathies wholly French, asks of the Empire no more than to be let alone.* A more damning indictment of German methods there could not possibly be. And in the present effort to achieve the national ambition it almost seems that an empire has gone mad. * In the stormy northern seas, not far from the estuary of the Elbe and out of sight of other land, a tiny island rises like a castle from the waves. Red sandstone cliffs all round, with sundry pillars like the Man of Hoy, the tableland only to be gained by a steep flight of steps, a shingle beach below ; close by the Diine, another little island, chiefly sand. Wild cabbage grows in places on the cliffs ; sheep feed upon the narrow pastures up above. The small streets of the town are made pleasant by plane trees and honeysuckle ; and in the picturesque and quaint old church men's names are painted in many colours on their pews, ship models hang from the roof. Such is the famous Helgoland, which passed from Penmark to England in the wars of Napoleon, but in 32 ARMS AND THE MAP 1890 it was ceded to the Kaiser and transformed into a modern fort. It was practically exchanged for Zanzibar. H. Labouchere pointed out what to him appeared the unwisdom of the cession in Truths but this was partly at least because his political opponent Lord Salisbury was responsible for it. The present writer visited the place in 1896 ; its two thousand Frisian people seemed glad to belong to the country that sends them so many paying guests, but many preferred the simple English establishment of one governor and one policeman to the vast army of German officials. Note to p. 17. — The Emperors should have been crowned thrice. With a silver crown at Aachen, an iron one at Milan, a gold one at Rome. CHAPTER II FRANCE France furnishes a most instructive example of how a nation may be built on politeness out of elements that were very diverse. Alone of European States she has a coast-line touching the grey North Sea and another washed by the blue Mediterranean. She has much of the vigour of the north, much of the kindly manner of the south. Prance is emphatically the home of ideas ; she has perhaps contributed more to the general civilisation of Europe than any other State. A product very largely of her mind were the aspiring lines of Gothic architecture ; hers, too, in origin the tournament and much of the display of mediaeval chivalry. So largely were the Crusades her enterprise, that 34 ARMS AND THE MAP in all the nearer East, Prank is still a general word for European. And in much more recent days it was the French who first realised that a great European Empire could be established in the interior of India, and how a great new Europe might be built in the North American continent. The French Revolution inaugurated many features of the modern world. Lavoisier was practically the inventor of chymistry as we know it. By Frenchmen the Suez Canal was built, the Panama Canal begun (p. 240). In aviation and other modern things the same people have been much to the fore. Gaul received a new name when its northern portion was conquered by the Franks, but so firmly planted were Latin institutions that the language and ideas of the conquered people were gradually adopted by their new German masters, that is, by such of them as settled in the conquered lands of Gaul. An ancient Roman town, called, from an FRANCE 35 almost forgotten tribe, Lutetia Parisiorum, an imperial city once, a favourite residence of the great Emperor Julian *, became the capi- tal of Latin Prance, and bit by bit its power ♦ Usually sumamed the Apostate because his disgust with court bishops caused him to renounce Christianity. In his " Misopogon " (Mio-orrwywj/) he gives the following description of the city that has meant so much for France : — "I happened to be spending the winter about my dear Lucetia. This is the name the Celts give to the little town of the Parisii. It is a small island lying in the river, surrounded by a waU, and wooden bridges lead to it from both sides. Occasionally the river becomes lower or higher, but for the most part it is the same in winter as in summer, the sweetest and purest water to see and to drink, for as they live on an island they have to get their water mostly from the river. The winter there is rather mild, whether from the warmth of the ocean, — for it is at most 900 stadia distant, and a light breeze is given off from the water, and seawater seems to be warmer than fresh, — whether from this cause or from some other unknown to me, the fact is so, the inhabitants have a rather warm winter, good vines grow among them, and some of them have contrived to rear fig trees, sheltering them in winter by clothing them in wheat straw and similar things which are used to protect trees against injury from cold air. Well, the winter happened to be more severe than usual, and the river brought down what I may call slabs of marble, — you know the white Phrygian stone, the blocks of ice were Just like it." c 2 36 AKMS AND THE MAP was extended over most of the principalities that had been set up by different conquerors in the old Koman diocese of Gaul — over Burgundians and Visigoths far away to the south, and over Normans on its own river in the north, later arrivals from barbarian lands. No slight element in the strong consolidation of France has been the almost unique attrac- tiveness of her great capital, not only to those who own it, but also to people so differently constituted as the ancient Romans and the Americans of to-day. And in more recent days France has gained considerable extension of territory along all her land borders to the east and the south. By the Peace of WestphaHa in 1648, ending the dreary Thirty Years War, the French gained part of the German land of Elsass (Alsace), which touches Switzerland on the south (p. 202). Further encroachments were gradually made, and in 1681 Louis XIV. seized Strassburg at a time of peace. Thus the FRANCE 37 province became French ; the frontier of the kingdom was shifted from the Vosges Moun- tains to the Rhine. The whole of the neigh- bouring province of Lothringen (Lorraine), with its strong fortress of Metz on the Moselle, finally became French (after shiftings *) in 1766. By the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659 France gained a small slice of Luxemburg and began to encroach on Flanders. After the purchase of Dunkirk f from Charles 11. of England she gained practically her present hmits in the low lands by the Treaty of Utrecht (immediately followed by the Barrier Treaty of 1715), which confirmed to France the district containing Lille and Valen- ciennes. Thus between Switzerland and the North Sea France's frontier for a hundred * Metz was first seized by the French as early as 1552. All Alsace-Lorraine (except the Belfort area) became a German Reichsland in 1871. t This port of the Low Countries had passed to the English under the Commonwealth in 1658 as a result of the Battle of the Dunes. 38 AEMS AND THE MAP miles was the Ehine, and further north she had pushed her borders far into the old realms of the Empire (p. 16). At an earher date on her far side she had gained from Spain the whole territory up to the Pyrenees, including many residents of Spanish stock (1659). Finally from Italy she gained in 1859-60 (as a reward for the services of Napoleon III.'s troops against Austria) the district from which the House of Savoy takes its name and the birth- place of Garibaldi — the Alpine province of Savoy and the lands about Nice by the sea. Thus on all her borders the territory of Prance is projected far among the lands of races other than her own. To a student of her history who has realised her mongrel stock, mixed races from the south and north, Itahan here and Fleming there, Spaniard in another part, it must seem only natural that France should suffer very much from diverse PRANCE 89 aims in different parts and much local dis- content. It is a very great surprise to know that such a State is more strongly compacted than any other approaching equal size. Although no important European country exactly comprises a nation within its political boundaries, Prance comes very much the nearest of them all. It is no small tribute to a nation that has relied as a rule rather on moral than on material forces that no community that has ever come strongly under the spell of France has desired to break away. This is just as marked in earlier as in later years. The Nor- mans or Northmen were of Scandinavian stock, but during their sojourn of four or five generations in the lands by the mouth of the Seine, to which they gave their name, they had become entirely Prench. In the pictorial record of the Conquest that we know as the Bayeux Tapestry, undoubtedly worked under the direction of the victors, the Normans themselves are styled Pranci. At Cherbourg 40 ARMS AND THE MAP on the Quay stands a fine church in the Flam- boyant style. It was erected by the towns- men in 1450 in fulfilment of a vow about the ending of '* foreign " rule. Normans now felt themselves true compatriots with their old French enemies, ahen from their own kindred who had become absorbed by the race they had conquered nearly four centuries before. This French power of making themselves agreeable to all other races, the greatest asset their nation has, marks them at all periods of their history and in every quarter of the world. It is a well-known story how Fron- tenac at Quebec threw off his uniform and even clothes to take part in the war-dance of savages in the paint and feathers of an Indian brave. We should hardly expect to see an EngHsh of&cer doing anything of that kind, and wherever in the seventeenth and eigh- teenth centuries English and French were competing with each other for the favour of FRANCE 41 distant peoples, whether in North America or in India, the French were immeasurably the more successful of the two.* (It is true, indeed, that one community at least French in geography, in institutions, law, and still to a great extent in speech, has become completely EngHsh in feeling, so English, indeed, as to have developed for a term of contempt the expression ** fit only for a Frenchman." A relic of the Duchy of Normandy is still retained in the very beauti- ful little islands of granite and rolling grass- land that rise from blue waters between the peninsulas of Manche and Brittany. The French know them as the Isles Normandes ; the English (less appropriately) call them the Channel Islands, although they are hardly in the Channel. The wealthier part of the popu- lation is very largely of Huguenot extraction. Of every other portion of the British Empire * But by their staying power, and perhaps also by their sense of fair play, the English afterwards did much to reverse the first judgment against them. 42 ARMS AND THE MAP the sovereign is lord as King of Scotland or of England, but these islands he holds in a capacity entirely different. They are his as Duke of Normandy, though it is a title he no longer bears.) Prance indeed has often laid foundations on which others were to build. Great fabrics planned in India, Canada, and Panama are now covered by other flags. But in her mar- vellous power of attracting men of other race she has worked most brilliantly for herself. Any other European country in her position would almost certainly have discontented populations and regional problems on every hand. It is a triumph of the Frenchman's powers of conciliation that he in his broad territory has none.* Nor do the peoples on the furthest borders of France resent the fact * It is, however, an interesting speculation how far the substitution of soulless departements for the ancient geographical divisions has contributed to this result. Some compensation is naturally to be demanded for so gross an insult to the nation's past. PRANCE 43 that their affairs are so entirely centralised in the fair city on the Seine. On the contrary, there are people outside more than one of her frontiers who would not unwillingly be included in her realm. The Bretons in their wild and legend- haunted land, the Basques by the towering mountains on the border of Spain, still keep their ancient ways, still speak their venerable tongues, but they present no appreciable problem for the French. The really serious problem for this most attractive people is provided purely by them- selves. No friend of France can contemplate without a shudder the effect of a birth rate so low that the population is actually dwindling, on the position of the race in the world. If France merely aspired to be one of the great European Powers the matter would be exceedingly serious ; since she desires to possess a great world empire it is no less than appalHng. CHAPTER III THE LOW COUNTRIES Holland is the gift of the Rhine as truly as Egypt is the gift of the Nile, and Napoleon was, geologically at any rate, justified in claiming the district on the ground that he had conquered the hills from which its soil was washed. So low-lying is much of the surface that by cutting the dykes Holland was laid under water to expel the Spaniards in the sixteenth century, and small parts of Belgium were similarly and with equal heroism flooded to embarrass the Germans in the twentieth. Tacitus tells us that the Batavi who occu- pied the Low Countries in his time were fore- most among all the Germans for valour. During mediaeval days the district for the THE LOW COUNTRIES 45 most part pertained directly to the Empire, though the country of Flanders was a fief of France. The area was extraordinarily rich from the energy and enterprise of its people ; prosperous cities, it was said, were in those parts as thickly sprinkled as were villages elsewhere in Europe, and of the vigorous life of those cities splendid evidences have come down to our day. The civic spirit is shown by the fact that buildings for government and commercial purposes are here and nowhere else in Europe frequently more prominent and more beautiful than the churches themselves. A sturdy independence and a touch of anti- clericaUsm on the part of the burghers is apparent in the fact that till the time of Philip II. the Low Countries had only four bishoprics.* The pervading influence of the Roman Empire is shown by the fact that in imitation * Liege, Toiirnay, Utrecht, and Arras. The last is now far within the limits of France. 46 AEMS AND THE MAP of the well-known letters S.P.Q.R. {Senatus populusque Bomanus) the public buildings at Bruges, for example, display the adapted form S.P.Q.B. And the burghers possessed more privileges than in almost any other European land. Their right to manage their own affairs was everywhere conceded, and by the charter of the leading province of Brabant, known as the Joyous Entry, the people had to swear allegiance to their sovereign only as he respected the cherished privileges of the duchy. The inhabitants of what would have been merely a salt marsh, if Nature were left alone, had to be men of keen energy and iron will. By the sixteenth century, despite all dis- advantages, the Low Countries had become the commercial and industrial pivot of Europe. They sent their products far and wide ; they maintained one of the greatest universities of the world (dating from 1426) in fair Lou vain, whose burning in the Great Mad War the THE LOW COUNTRIES 47 whole world mourns to-day. Antwerp, the chief port, had become so great a centre of trade that it sheltered colonies of traffickers from the British Isles, the Itahan and the Hansa free cities, Portugal, and even the dominions of the Sultan of Turkey. The land which is naturally the flattest and least beautiful of all western Europe has been made by its people one of the most delightful parts of the Continent, in its buildings and collec- tions of art hardly surpassed on the earth. But with so many solid advantages the Low Countries suffered very much from great disunion : every town was jealous of every other ; purely local feeling was nowhere quite so strong. The area in fact formed a sort of epitome of Europe as a whole. The north was Teutonic, the south Romance. The north spoke varying dialects of Low Dutch ; the south (once part of the Roman diocese of Gaul *) had in Walloon an independent later * Tournay, Mons, and other places in Belgium, 48 ARMS AND THE MAP Latin speech of its own, besides Flemish, another Teutonic dialect aUied to Holland- Dutch. Strong French influence in Flanders, Artois, and Brabant created further disunion by causing the tongue of Paris to be widely heard. The Low Countries were inherited by Philip II. of Spain (husband of EngHsh Mary) from his father Charles V. (I. of Spain). He had received them from the Dukes of Burgundy of the Valois House, by whom they had been gradually acquired towards the end of the middle ages, chiefly during the fifteenth cen- tury. Charles V. did much for the prosperity of Flanders, for he felt at home there more than in any other part of his wide and scattered realms ; he had been born at Ghent in the last year of the fifteenth century. It was in Brussels during 1555 that, leaning on the arm of the noble William, Prince of Orange, besides several towns in Holland (pp. 53, 64), are on Roman sites. THE LOW COUNTRIES 49 Charles V. resigned his dominions to retir© into the Monastery of Yuste, among the moun- tains of Spain, where he is said to have found it as difficult to make his clocks keep the same time as formerly to make his subjects hold the same religion.* The extraordinarily bad government of Philip II. caused the great struggle that set up the Dutch Eepublic. War may be said to have begun as a result of his letter from the Wood of Segovia, 17th October, 1565, repu- diating all idea of toleration in reHgion. How by flood and sword, by weary war on land, and more exciting conflicts on the sea, Holland was liberated inch by inch is a thrice- told tale. The most heroic incident perhaps was the noble defence of Leyden, on the Old Rhine, in 1574. It was commemorated by the setting up of the world-famous university that * This may practically be considered the end of the Holy Roman Empire, for no successor of Charles was either crowned in Rome, or in any other Italian town, or really exercised any imperial functions beyond the limits of Grermany and the Austrian dominions. 50 AEMS AND THE MAP amid many other glories became in the next century the chief centre of European science. In 1581 deputies of the United Provinces at the Hague set forth the Act of Abjuration, which for ever severed Holland from the dominion of Spain. " 'Tis well known to all," it asserts, " that if a prince is appointed by God over the land, it is to protect the people from harm, even as a shepherd to the guar- dianship of his flock. The subjects are not appointed by God for the behoof of the prince, but the prince for his subjects, without whom he is no prince. Should he violate the laws, he is to be forsaken by the meanest of his subjects and to be recognised no longer as prince." This was almost the only democratic document that the era of the Eenaissance knew. The independence of the Dutch was not formally acknowledged till 1648, by which time the recognition was a farce. For Holland had by then developed a most virile feeling of THE LOW COUNTRIES 51 nationality — ^had, in fact, become one of the leading Powers of the world, whose flag was flying in six continents and over every sea : in Grotius she had produced the founder of International Law. ** I saw," he wrote in words even more applicable to our age than to his, " I saw the whole Christian world consumed by a lust of fighting at which even barbarians might blush, wars begun on trifling pretexts or none at all, and carried on without reverence for any law of God or man, as if that one declaration of war let loose every crime." The Latin part of the country, however, made its peace on fairly favourable terms with Spain, being almost wholly Eoman in faith and not animated by the same spirit as the north. Independent Holland, coming some distance south of the Rhine, soon eclipsed in importance the Netherlands that were first Spanish and then Austrian under the Hapsburg House. Leyden supplanted 52 AEMS AND THE MAP Louvain in learning, Amsterdam took the place of Antwerp as a resort for ships. After the Napoleonic wars by the prince- ridden Congress of Vienna the whole of the Low Countries was united under a common king, but the forces of disruption were still exceedingly strong. The arrangement was not to last. It seems strange in a city of such historical associations as Brussels to find to-day one of the most prominent of its monuments commemorating the martyrs of 1830-33, when the country split off from Holland to become a little State, its neutrality guaranteed by the Powers.* But in spite of all guarantees Belgium was to gain an undying name, though at most ghastly cost, by having to refuse a passage to the German troops at the outset of the Great Mad War. Along the whole southern frontier the French had * The Treaty guaranteeing Belgian neutrality (the so-called " scrap of paper ") was signed in 1839 by the Plenipotentiaries of Britain, Belgium, Austria, France, Prussia, and Russia. THE LOW COUNTRIES 53 largely encroached in earlier days (p. 37), and also made entirely French the area they seized. Likewise the Dutch, besides coming far south into the old diocese of Gaul, had con- trived to hold the islands and the mainland on both sides of the Schelde to keep Antwerp in a state of permanent blockade, thus leaving Ostende almost the only open seaport of Belgium. On the other side of the kingdom Maastricht, the Roman Traiectum Superius, with territory extending some distance to the south, was retained by the Dutch, who also kept their hold on Luxemburg, detached beyond the wooded rocks of Ardennes. The limits of Belgium are thus somewhat re- stricted, and both her sea coast and frontier with Germany are very short. On the other hand, her territory includes practically all the more famous and picturesque of the mediaeval towns of the Low Countries. Since indepen- dence was won they have regained much of 54 AEMS AND THE MAP their former prosperity, not it is to be hoped permanently damaged by being made once more, in flagrant violation of treaty, the unwilling seat of wasting war. But for the splendid sea empire and world trade which Holland gained for herself, with the help of many German individuals, the country might readily have become a pro- vince of the Fatherland, containing as it does the ancient Eoman frontier Ehine town, Noviomagus, now picturesque Nimwegen, one of the seats of the great Charles. But fate otherwise decreed : a dialect of Low Dutch has become one of the great languages of the world, and it may safely be said that no country of such narrow bounds ever before left such a mark on the world as a whole (p. 237 seq.). Along the course of the Nechte, which flows into the Zuider Zee, and still more pro- minently of the Ehine, German territory extends somewhat far into Holland, including among other places Cleves, with its pic- I THE LOW COUNTKIES 55 turesque old castle of brick, the home of his wife Anne whom Henry VIII. called the Flemish mare. But although in this direction Germany to-day undoubtedly includes territory that more naturally pertains to the Low Countries, it can hardly be said to constitute a problem, for the soil in question has never belonged to Holland. The exact boundary of Germany and the Lowlands it is practically impossible to draw, while the borderland is as redolent of historical memories for the Germans as it is for the Dutch. The Duchy of Luxemburg was of old one of the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands, although it is an upland district draining to the Moselle and for the most part German in speech. It lost a slice to Prance in 1659 (p. 37) ; another part was given to Belgium in 1839 when the settlement was arranged between that country and Holland after the war some years before. The connection of 56 ARMS AND THE MAP Luxemburg with the Netherlands was always rather political than geographical, and in 1890, on the accession to the Dutch throne of Queen Wilhelmina, it became an independent Grand Duchy, a rather interesting survival of the once numerous German petty States. Between 1815 and 1866 it had been within the German confederation, its sovereign being the King of the Netherlands, whose other territory was of course outside the confedera- tion. To-day it is lawfully within the ZoU- verein and the railway system of Germany, quite otherwise within that of her military operations, for its neutrality was guaranteed in the Treaty of London (11th May, 1867) by Britain, Austria, Prussia, Prance, Belgium, Holland, Italy, and Russia. It is natural enough that Germany should covet the two Netherland kingdoms, for their history is closely locked with hers, and they shut out her richest territory from the sea.* * Of course, equally natural that other Powers should be determined they shall continue to be free. THE LOW COUNTRIES 57 Each possesses a considerable colonial empire, Holland in the East Indian Islands and South America, Belgium in the Kongo ; but the whole of this is tropical, with nothing that can well be called a white man's country. There is no part that would provide what Germany most needs, a land where European settlers could find new homes on any con- siderable scale. Long before the union of Germany had been accomplished each of the smaller nations had acquired national tradi- tions of her own, and at least in the case of Holland a really great career that no one could wish to see absorbed or swamped. Not altogether by chance has the term ** Dutch," which should apply to the whole German race, been restricted in English speech to the dwellers by the mouths of the Rhine. So little have the Germans been able to win the love of their small neighbours that it may well be doubted whether a single disinterested individual could be found among the teeming 58 AEMS AND THE MAP populations of Holland and Belgium who would wish to see his country made a province of the Fatherland. On the other hand, it seems practically impossible in any case to compensate Belgium for her great sufferings by any gift of German soil.* To hand over the city of Charles the Great to a non-German land would leave a legacy of bitterest hate, the fruitful seed of future strife. * Thoughtful Belgians seem to be pretty unanimous in not desiring so very serious a responsibility for their much -wronged country. CHAPTER IV THE BRITISH ISLES In all the British Isles there is no more history-haunted spot than Tara Hill, world famous from the poetry of Moore. There is none of the bewildering magnifi- cence that marks the site of ruined cities otherwhere. Sheep pasture now over earth- works that carry back the mind through the long vistas of unnumbered years, not pre- historic only through the excellence of the records that the old Irish kept. Prom the round raths and the foundations of the great hall of Cormac mac Art (750 feet long) one looks far and wide over and beyond the fair realm of Meath, whose rolling grasslands are partitioned into fields by wild thick hedges and graceful trees. Northward spreads out the storied valley of the Boyne ; westward 60 ARMS AND THE MAP stand up above the trees the towers and spires of Trim, Meath's capital to-day. There are hills in the distance on every side, but none are very striking save toward the south the rounded peaks of the Wicklow Mountains, that hold fair Glendalough amid their folds. Nor is it apparent from the high land that so many of the cottages below are roofless, though on the near-by Hill of Skreen — the ancient Aichill — a ruined church is seen. Here was the centre of the highest culture that the north of Europe knew while Rome and Carthage were at death-grip for the mas- tery of the south. Here was the court of the High King of All Ireland in the days when an island nation was being toilfully evolved. The Celtic race, whose service to the civiH- sation of the world is yet untold, unsung, had been widely and powerfully spread over the continent of Europe in eariier years, and in the summer of 390 B.C. Celtic Gauls captured the future mistress of the world, Imperial Rome I THE BRITISH ISLES 61 herself — ^her work yet hardly begun. The name of a colony of Celts or Galatians in Asia Minor is chiefly known to most of us from the epistle addressed to them by St. Paul. The noblest work of Ireland for mankind was in her keeping alive Western culture through the weary centuries after the Western Empire had collapsed, and before it was re- built to some extent by Charles the Great (p. 11). The Island of the Saints in very- truth she was when her monkish teachers were toiling in almost every European land ; and during the seventh and eighth centuries hardly a soul in Western Europe knew Greek who was not Irish-born or Irish-taught. While students from every Christian land were sitting at the feet of turbaned Oriental scholars amid the scintillating mosaics of the new seats of Arab culture, others were gaining a not inferior education under the damp thatch of huts on the lonely Irish bogs. Most happily the civilisation of Ireland was 62 AKMS AND THE MAP never battered down by the all-subduing legions of Rome ; she was working out her own salvation in her own way when about the middle of the sixth century there descended a blow from within more serious than any that could have come from without. The most unhappy cursing of Tara * by St. Euadhan of Lothra gave her nationhood a set-back from which no recovery ever came. Tara had been for centuries neutral ground to all the clans, and round it clustered whatever com- mon sentiment the people had. It was not very strong, but there it was. It is rather significant that the different raihs are fortified against each other, while Tara as a whole was not fortified against the world. When Tara ceased to be the High King's * It was on account of a rather involved dispute between the clergy and the High King, in which it is exceedingly difficult to sympathise with the former. They had various rather frivolous reasons why the murderers of the king's spear-bearer, who accompanied his herald, should not be punished. I THE BRITISH ISLES 68 seat and each High King in turn ruled from his own clan soil, there was no sign of imme- diate decay. The best days of Ireland's intellectual pre-eminence were still to come, but there was no national centre. Clon- macnoise, so grandly impressive to-day with its two round towers and seven churches rising on an esker above the peat-bogs by the smooth, broad Shannon in a wild and almost treeless waste, was the greatest of all the Irish colleges and common to all the clans, but it had no political power. So at the time of the first English invasion in the reign of Henry II. Ireland was still torn. Giraldus Cambrensis, the chief authority for the period, who never misses an opportunity of saying something spiteful about his fellow Celts — though he was partly of Norman race — ogives us the following information : "As it is with all other nations, in the north of I Ireland the inhabitants are warlike, while 64 ARMS AND THE MAP one people seekers after fame, the other seekers after fraud ; the former rest their hopes on war, the latter on their wiles ; those put forth their strength, these descend to stratagem ; there we find battle, here be- trayal." * Even during the long and weary years of Anglo-Norman and mediaeval English rule the Irish would not forget their internal squabbles, nor did any chieftain for his country's sake ever refuse the help of the invader against his local foes. But in spite of all, the Irish contrived very largely to absorb all those with whom they were brought in contact, chiefly on account of those courteous and singularly attractive quaUties that to this day so stamp them as a nation. The pre-Celtic population had been gradually assimilated in earlier times. Many a Danish plunderer had made the Green Island his home ; Dublin, Waterford, and other sea- * Expugnatio Hibernica, II., 20. THE BRITISH ISLES 65 ports owed their origin to viking hordes ; the famous round towers were erected at least in part for defence against these northern foes. But before the Anglo-Nor- mans came the Scandinavians had forgotten their eastern homes and become as Irish as any Celt. Many an Anglo-Norman family settled in the now expanding, now contracting pale, of which Dublin was the principal town, but despite the frown of kings and plenty of Acts of Pariiament, the children of the conquerors were soon proud to use the Irish tongue and wear the saffron robes that the Irish wore. In later times, from the days when Mary and Philip laid out the counties called Queen's and King's, with Maryborough and Philips- town as their capitals, to the triumph of Dutch WilUam at the Battle of the Boyne, nearly every English sovereign tried to settle English population in Ireland. But though 66 AEMS AND THE MAP at one time or another about three-quarters of Ireland was " planted," the intruded popu- lation has been everywhere absorbed save in the north-east of Ulster, where a virile race of Scots forms the bulk of the people of Antrim, Down, Armagh and Derry, and flows over in very considerable numbers into Tyrone and other bordering shires. As one crosses the border to-day from Leinster into Ulster the character of the landscape changes, decidedly though very gradually. The decaying picturesqueness of the south with its peeling walls of mud and weed-grown roofs of thatch, its chickens, ducks, goats, donkeys in the streets, gives place to prosperous, uninspiring, linen-making towns, whose general atmosphere rather recalls the not very beautiful settlements that crowd the vicinity of Glasgow. And the people seem more alert and keen ; there is a suggestion of more business and less talk in the sometimes teeming market-places of the THE BEITISH ISLES 67 thriving little towns. One is conscious, in fact, of very much the same differences as may be seen in nearly all modern countries when one has passed from the south to the north, though in Ireland the peoples are so very mixed that the contrast is on the whole perhaps less striking than in England. The relations between the two races, the Scottish and the Celtic Irish, are rather baffling at first sight, still more so as one studies them more closely. Neither has the very smallest hesitation in abusing the other to a stranger. The Ulstermen, it is alleged by their rivals, are traitors to Ireland, out of sympathy with the land that feeds them ; the NationaHsts to their neighbours appear absolutely untrustworthy, enemies of the Empire that protects them. Yet in each case there is an extremely common rider that the speaker has many of his best friends among the other race, ** but that of course makes no difference to the principle." ■ 8 68 ARMS AND THE MAP An eminent Frenchman has said that if one desires to know what the English have accomplished in the world one must walk through the forests of British Columbia and traverse the hot Indian plains, for it is a race that has carried its influence to the remotest corners of the globe. But if one desires to reaHse what the EngHsh have not done, there is need to go no further from England than across the Channel of St. George ! The builders of the most successful Empire that the world has ever seen have Ireland to keep them humble at their very doors. A better day it may be hoped is dawning from the prospective settlement about Home Rule and from the part played by the Irish in the Great Ifeijyar^that blazed out in 1914. Much is spoken about solving problems and improving relations between the two races, but nothing would really do so much as a more generous appreciation of the contribution each has made to the civiUsation of mankind in the r THE BRITISH ISLES 69 school books used by the other.* The Enghsh who so easily forget to-day the hard things they were saying last week do not understand a people with the Irish depth of feeling. The " Red Branch " refused in 1260 to fight the Normans in the Battle of Downpatrick with the other Irish, under the Prince of the O'Neills, because they felt so sore about the burning of their old capital, Emania near Armagh. It had happened nine hundred years before. The Irish, out of originally very miscel- laneous elements, have evolved an intensely strong nationality of their own. Really it is about the most persistent on the earth.f * Europe knows surprisingly little about the fair land of Erin. Despite their marvellous powers of gathering facts, the Germans appear entirely to have overlooked the close relations between Ireland and Belgium. The *' Four Masters " was written largely in Louvain. Hardly a Roman Catholic church in Ireland is without pictures printed in Belgium, though Russian ones are also becoming common. t In 1899 the present writer spoke to an Irishman in San Francisco who was bringing up his children to fight 70 AEMS AND THE MAP Protestant Ulster forms a small nation of itself with peculiar and individual charac- teristics, in some ways, but by no means in all, feeling more sympathy for Great Britain than for Nationalist Ireland. In Scotland we find a country of very mis- cellaneous stock. The people of the High- lands and most of the western islands are Celtic, with perhaps rehcs of a yet earher race ; Caithness with the Orkneys, Shetlands, and some other areas are for the most part Norse ; while the fertile plains of Lothian and the uplands of Berwickshire formed part of the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria. There is some doubt as to how far the present inhabi- tants of the Highlands are descended from the Caledonians against whom Septimius Severus led his army far into the wilds of Aberdeenshire. These northern districts were for tlie freedom of Ireland. Further inquiry elicited the fact that he had never been in Erin, nor had his father, but his grandfather had emigrated to California with a burning sense of wrong. THE BRITISH ISLES 71 P l^pever conquered by the Eomans, but they clearly possessed very little of the high culture that makes the study of the contemporary Irish so interesting. The Romans paid the Caledonians a very high compliment in drawing against them from the Forth to the Clyde, and further south from the Tyne to the Solway, the most for- midable defences that anywhere protected their far-jflung frontiers. Why the southern at any rate of these walls was stronger than that which protected the line of the Danube and the Rhine (so very much nearer to Italy) is one of the great problems of Roman history. That so miscellaneous a population should have been focussed into a nation with such intensely strong feelings as the Scots possess was no mean achievement. It was Ireland that gave both the name of Scotia and the dynasty that cemented Celt of the Highlands, Norse of the islands, and Angle of the Lothians 72 AEMS AND THE MAP into one. The sovereigns of Dalriada, an Irish colony in Argyll, by whose people St. Columba was received, little by little gathered all Scotland under their sceptre, and much later in 1603 received the English Crown as well. It was not, however, till more recent days (after the Jacobite rising of 1745) that the Highlands and Lowlands became truly one. It is remarkable that all Scots look back with pride to the Battle of KiUiecrankie in 1689 ; the memory of the Boyne fought next year still bitterly divides the Irish. Singularly complete is the feeling of soH- darity that binds all Scots to-day ; the very composite origin of the population is hardly remembered at all. Common love of a beau- tiful land, common admiration for Burns and Scott, perhaps also common pride in the huge share they take in the government of England, have produced one of the compactest nations in the world. The barrier between Teuton and Celt is broken down as in no other land. THE BRITISH ISLES 73 Yet there has never been any widespread desire that Scotland should have a local administration of her own, a fact that shows how difficult it may be to postulate the form that nationality will take.* A sort of freemasonry binds all Scots together in the furthest corners of the world and down to the latest generations. It is certainly not easy to account for the fact that close geographical proximity and so many common institutions have not led to closer relations between Scots of Scotland and of Ulster — not that they are any way estranged, but they have drifted in politics on to different sides. It is eloquent of the pertinacity of the Celt in cherishing his own ways of thought that Wales has preserved her individuahty and to * It is strange that the rivalry between Edinburgh and Glasgow should be one of the chief impediments to Scottish Home Rule. The latter would much rather be governed from London than from the capital of Scotland. 74 AEMS AND THE MAP a great extent her language through four centuries of Eoman rule and six of English, and this without any capital or central rally- ing point of her own. Even to-day Welsh communications centre largely in Shrewsbury, an EngHsh town. A considerable number of words in Welsh are of Latin origin, but on the whole, considering the completeness with which Britain appears to have been Eomanised, the only present representatives of the pro- vincial population retain fewer traces of Latin influence than might have been presupposed. If we may judge by the writings of Nennius and Gildas, the Welsh, after their long con- tact with Eome, were decidedly less intel- lectually advanced than the unconquered Irish. If we desire to estimate the nature of the influence that the Welsh have exerted on the Enghsh, we can probably get at it in no better way than by comparing Saxon character in its Enghsh settlements and in its earher THE BRITISH ISLES 76 German home. It is an influence difficult to define, but one we would most unwillingly lose. England and Wales formed a diocese of the praefectural province of Gaul, whose import- ance from the evidence of archaeology was greater than we might have expected from the evidence of documents, extremely scanty as these are. By far the most important direct legacy of the empire to this land is the splendid network of roads, which continued to be the best in the country right down to the Peace of Paris in 1763. In the early years of the fifth century the Roman legions were withdrawn, leaving the northern districts to suffer much from Picts and Scots. A most dogged resistance was made by the British to the tribes who after about fifty years began swarming in over the eastern sea from what are now the lands of Denmark and Germany. Only mile by mile, almost yard by yard, did the Teutonic 76 AEMS AND THE MAP invaders win their westward way, driving the Britons into Cornwall or Wales or Strathclyde or over the sea into Brittany. Not until they were Christians did they gain Exeter, the great city of the West, and that they divided with the Celt, each people dedicating churches to the saints which it preferred in its own quarter of the town. Throughout the eastern parts of the country the Britons had been entirely supplanted so far as institutions went, but many of them were undoubtedly absorbed by their conquerors. All the west country still bears much evidence of Celtic thought, in the widespread belief in pixies and fairies, in the ancient Arthurian legends, and all the misty folk-lore that so marks the Celtic race. Very largely reinforced by Scandinavian invaders, the different communities of Saxon and Angle and Jute were slowly feeling after a national unity, but at the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066 they had neither THE BRITISH ISLES 77 developed more than a very loosely compacted nationality nor completed the subjugation of the land in the west. The crushing force of the Norman invader greatly helped the union of the Saxons with the Danes in the east and the Celts in the west, while later comers, such as Huguenots and Flemings, were so sprinkled up and down the la,nd that their amalgama- tion could be only matter of time. Her insular position, her unifying rivers and the absence of seriously dividing mountains caused England, early among European States, to find a nationality of her own. The mediaeval conception of government and the feudal system that centred in the emperor hardly left room for the nation. It was under EHzabeth, a truly national queen, who never left England during her whole Hfe, hardly recognised by the Continental sovereigns, without interests over the sea, that England practically entered on national life in the modern sense. 78 ARMS AND THE MAP The voyages of Drake and other sea heroes of that day did much to consoHdate the coun- try by giving it a common pride, and the new enthusiasm is superbly expressed by Shake- speare in the famous speech of the dying John of Gaunt (in ** Richard IL") about **this royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, . . . this land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land." For over a century the British Isles have formed a United Kingdom, though never in any real sense a single nation. Wales has acquired a vigorous national feeling of her own since her incorporation with England, for before she was divided into hostile clans. In Scotland and Ireland there were traditions of national life centuries before union came, but the feeling has certainly become intensi- fied since their political independence ceased. At the present time it is remarkable that national feeling is very much more strongly developed in Ireland, in Wales, and in Scot- THE BEITISH ISLES 79 land than in England herself. CosmopoU- tanism has to a vast extent ousted nationality in the ** dominant partner." It is scarcely too much to say that England has no capital of her own, since London, as the chief city of an Empire and the commercial and financial centre of the earth, has hardly time to be anything else. Though purely accidental, it is strangely appropriate that the very name of the city is not EngUsh, but Welsh. Though all connected with law and govern- ment, trade, society, and railways is centred in the capital, London has really surprisingly little soul of her own ; not for centuries has the great city been the real focus of new intellectual, religious or even poHtical ideas.* * A certain lack of special interest in their own city that is always supposed to characterise Londoners is nothing new. In the Heimshringla, " Saga of Harald the Hard-redy," LIX., we read : "At last he came to London Bridge, and there asked the folk of the city if they knew to tell him where was Olaf 's church. But tiiey 80 ARMS AND THE MAP In English-speaking communities over sea it is most marked that the feasts of St. Patrick, St. Andrew, and St. David are very much more enthusiastically honoured than that of St. George, though this is now less true than it was ten years ago. Some Enghsh counties, however, such as Yorkshire, Devon, and Lancaster, have a strongly developed local feeling of their own. It is now generally admitted that the attempt to force a single centralised Govern- ment on the four nations that occupy the British Isles has not been an unqualified success. The attempt at unification was never very logically carried out ; the half- Celtic and half-Norse lordship of the Isle of Man has been allowed to retain its House of Keys, because it was hardly large enough to matter. It may be that a solution of the answered and said that there were many more churches there than they might wot to whom they were hallowed." THE BKITISH ISLES 81 whole problem will be found in a federal system for the British Isles, but it would be more in accordance with EngUsh traditions to make some sort of illogical compromise about the Irish question and there to let the matter rest. If any federation were seriously pro- posed it might certainly be worth considering whether the local Legislature for England could not be more satisfactorily placed in some such city as Oxford or York than in the capital of the Empire itself — that is, assuming that it is desirable to foster a distinctively English feeling of nationality. The great advantage that Britain possesses over any of the other European nations is that Nature has marked out her frontiers so clearly that they cannot be changed. PoU- tical efforts to unite her with different parts of the Continent — to Scandinavia under Knut, to Normandy and other parts of France under William the Conqueror and his successors, to Holland under WiUiam HI., to Hanover 82 ARMS AND THE MAP under the Georges — ^have to the great advan- tage of the nation never succeeded for long. And the Channel Tunnel has greatly reduced our anxieties by not being built. CHAPTER V RUSSIA The Slavic race, which fills up all the east of Europe, is in temperament very largely Asiatic, especially in the fact that, while democratic in its village country life, it has small power of organising popular govern- ment on any considerable scale. It is this quality, more than anything else, which has caused so much revolutionary agitation in Russia to leave things, on the surface at any rate, very much where they were. Where Saxondom breeds men of vigorous action such as Cromwell and Washington, Slavdom produces rather thinkers of Tolstoy or Kropotkin type. The Saxon revolutionist at once sets up a government of his own, and sees to it that the world respects his power. w2 84 AEMS AND THE MAP The Eussian revolutionist dreams of philo- sophic anarchy which may cure the evils of mankind. The name of Eus seems originally to have belonged to a small body of Swedes who in the ninth century settled among the Slavs that dwelt near the Baltic shore. The State which Euric and his Northmen thus set up, having survived the weary vicissitudes of more than a thousand years, stands one of the foremost of the Powers to-day. By Vladimir, their great ruler in the tenth century, the Eussians were made a Christian folk, holding the faith of the Eastern Church. It is said that the sovereign, seeking a new religion for the nation, had at first been much attracted to Islam, but, finding that it forbade the use of alcohol, concluded that it was unsuited to the Eussians. If true, which probably it is not, the story must increase our admiration for the reform so recently made. In the early thirteenth century the northern RUSSIA 85 Slavs had their attention somewhat forcibly directed to the affairs of Asia by the sudden arrival of barbarian hordes, to whom they were forced to pay tribute for more than two hundred years (1238—1462). The Mongols, who have given their name to the most numerous branch of the human race, and at one time conquered nearly the whole of Asia and all the east of Europe, are first heard of in Chinese history on the grassy plains by the upper waters of the Amur, in the district south-east of Lake Baikal. During their domination of Eussia the land was very completely Orientahsed ; her people learned to wear long beards and the flowing robes of the East, to go about their business in a leisurely way, through the shaded bazaars of their towns. A race with less backbone might have gone down for ever during those long years of foreign oppression. The Rus- Kians emerged more vigorous than before to 86 AEMS AND THE MAP Almost as soon as the Mongol was driven forth, the Eussians started that march across Asia (p. 91) which has carried their arms from the burning plains of Persia to the frozen northern sea, and from the Caucasus to the frontiers of China. Like the Egyptians of old, but with far more truth, they might have claimed that among the realms of Asia they placed their frontiers where they would, till they were recently checked by Japan. How far the Eussian masses are animated by patriotism in the Western sense it is extremely difficult to say. Dr. Johnson professed to find in it the last resource of scoundrels, but we have hardly endorsed this view. Thus Tolstoy writes,* the man that the Eussian people adored : "I have lived half a century amid the Eussian people, and in the great mass of labourers, during that period, I have never once seen nor heard any manifestation or expression of this sentiment * " Patriotism and Christianity." RUSSIA 87 of patriotism, unless one should count those patriotic phrases which are learned by heart in the army and repeated from books by the more superficial and degraded of the populace. . . . Patriotism is slavery." No study is more interesting or more baffling than the future of this mighty and yet unformed State. It is no reproach to see in the Russians the only teachable children to be found on the earth to-day. For while many individual Russians are leaders in European thought, the nation as a whole is still in a mediaeval atmosphere. While the Govern- ment has long been the most autocratic in Christian Europe, it is noteworthy that Russia has produced writers whose names are household words in countless EngUsh homes, especially those most interested in advanced plans of social reform. Rather ahen to the Russian mind our own conception of nation- hood may be, but there is no manner of doubt of the intensity of the Russian feeling for the 88 AEMS AND THE MAP whole race of Slavs. A people lukewarm and divided over the conflict with Japan stand white-hot as one man when the war is for the Slavic brother. If Pan-Slavism, that most vague thing of which we hear so much, means a common flag to cover the whole race, then eventually a single State must extend along the whole east shore of the Adriatic from Istria to Albania, and also spread to the iEgean, sur- rounding Romania on all her landward borders. But although this might perhaps appeal to some of the people of Petrograd,* it is hardly likely to appeal very strongly to the southern Slavs. In some respects at least the smaller Slav States have more national feeling than is the possession of the colossus of the north, and in fostering their * As we must now become accustomed to calling the city of Peter the Great. He wished it to be known after himself, the greatest of the Tsars ; Russian piety re- named it after the chief of the Apostles. The "St." was usually dropped in ordinary parlance, but not in oflacial documents. EUSSIA 89 growth the rulers of Petrograd are probably Betting up a formidable barrier to the exten- sion of their own frontiers in that particular direction. The first to dream of the union of all Slavs was John KoUar, born in 1793 at Mosotz, in Hungary ; he was of Slovak race (p. 136). " Scattered Slavs '* (he wrote), " let us be a united whole, and no longer mere fragments ! Let us be all or nought.** * If the Slavs be precious metal they must be hammered into a noble form, Eussia the head, Serbia the feet. In his later work, " Concerning Literary Eeciprocity between the various Eaces and Dialects of the Slav Nation " (1837), KoUar makes it plain enough that he aimed at no political union of Slavdom, but his successors were absolutely certain to dream of something of the kind. An extremely important point, however, ♦The "Slavy Dcera " ("Daughter of Slava "), Sonnet 326. Quoted by K. W. Seton-Watson in his *' Kacial Problems in Hungary," 1908. 90 AEMS AND THE MAP is that the population of Eastern Hungary, between the two sections of the Magyars (p. 134), is predominantly Eomanian,* and, although no doubt they are in fact very largely of Slav stock, their race-conscious- ness is quite different. Their glory is in the tradition of Eome (p. 104). Northern and southern Slavdom nowhere touch ; a glance at the racial map will make it clear that an uninterrupted belt of Eomanian, Magyar, and German population extends from the Black Sea to the German Ocean. The area comprised by the expression " All the Eussias," that is Central and Nor- thern Slavland, might easily have been split up among five or six States — even as Southern Slavland is torn — but for the absence of any geographical boundaries and the centraUsing influence of Moscow — the city which Eussians compare to Eome, only the former capital of * These people caU their own country Romania, the land of Rome, and the " u " seems quite superfluous. i EUSSIA 91 the world has no Kremhn ! Though not one of the ancientest of Russian towns, first men- tioned in documents no earher than 1143, Moscow was the very soul of the movements that drove the Mongols forth ; she gathered all Russia to herself and for a long time newly named the land. The great compact mass of Russian popu- lation is girdled round within the Empire by a ring of Slav and non-Slav peoples, to a greater or a less extent absorbed, save where — a relic of the former conquests of the Poles — West Russia is racially prolonged into the province of Galicia,* which Austria gained when Poland was split up. Here alone in Europe Russian folk dwell beyond the huge extent of the Tsar's domain. I Over the low Urals into Asia the Russian population has been gradually extending ever since the day when Ivan the Terrible sent the I * And further into a corner of north-east Hungary and northern Bukovina. 92 AEMS AND THE MAP first expedition across them, in the year that EHzabeth of England mounted her throne, 1558. Minghng with sundry sprinkled tribes, mostly of Mongol race, the Eussian settlers have widely farmed those parts, and they send their produce to the west. The conquest of Siberia * was achieved largely by the Cossacks, of whom there is a large population in the south-west of Eussia, on the Don and elsewhere.f They are so Eussified that any distinction between them and the Muscovites is largely forgotten in England. These Cossacks are an interesting folk, whose fathers in the thirteenth century banded together into a soldiers' league and welcomed all comers for common defence against the barbarian Mongols. Thus a mixed race was formed with a definite character of * The history of these events is given in my " Eastern Asia : A History.'* t The Cossacks are thus distributed to-day : Don, Kuban, Terek, Astrakhan, Ural, Orenburg, Siberia, Semiryechensk, Amur, Usuri. I EUSSIA 93 its own, later to become a warlike breed of Russian frontier guards. The Cossack fairy- tales, which have appeared in English, are in some ways strangely characteristic of a mongrel, artificial stock. In one of them, for instance, we have the rather unordinary com- Ibination of an Angel from God and a passport from the Tsar. Further west along the Black Sea shore pundry Asiatic folk of Turk and Mongol race, [mingled perhaps to some extent with remote descendants of Greek settlers in those parts, have been very generally absorbed by the Russians. The Krim Tatars, by far the widest known, have given their name to Crimea. Westward again is the land of Bessarabia, part of Romania once, still largely peopled by a Latin race, with a great number also of Jews (p. 106). Between Bessarabia and Poland, as we have already seen (p. 91), the Russian 94 AEMS AND THE MAP population extends somewhat far into the Austrian dominions. The Empire that has taken so many provinces from her neighbours on other sides has here a population of her own unredeemed — but it may not be for long ! Though Slavs, the Poles have been strongly influenced by the West, and they steadily decline to become either Russified or Teu- tonised. Using the Latin alphabet, building in the Gothic style, cleaving to the faith of Eome, they played a tolerably important part in Europe during mediaeval days. Their glory culminated perhaps in 1683, when under the heroic John Sobieski their arms did more than those of any other men to hurl back the Turk from the ramparts of Vienna (p. 169). But their government was distinctly bad ; the king himself was almost powerless among the restless nobihty that elected him, and by three successive partitions, in 1772, 1793, and 1795,* the whole territory of Poland was * Modified in 1807, 1815, and 1846. EUSSIA^ 96 divided between Eussia, Austria, and Prussia (p. 27). Eussia secured most of Lithuania * and of Poland herself. The promised reunion of the torn fragments is an act of tardy justice for a great and undoubted wrong. Whether the Poles can ever be permanently satisfied with mere autonomy the future must declare. What they desire is undoubtedly to stand up for themselves among the nations, free as any other race. Poland was blotted from the map of the world, but never from the hearts of Poles. Eussia has managed to assimilate large numbers of Asiatic folk, not closely related to her in race,| but on her fellow-Slavs * Intermittently from 1386 Lithuania was united to Poland, the Grand Duke Jagiello having married Edwige, the Polish queen. Persistent efforts to Polonise Lithu- ania caused the union to be extremely unpopular in the latter country. Even at the time of the Polish insurrec- tion of 1863 the Lithuanians declined to join, desiring separate freedom. The Poles are still attempting to absorb the Lithuanians, chiefly from their control of the (R. C.) Church organisation, but without very much success. The capital of Lithuania was Vilna. t While resident in Tientsin I had as neighbour a 96 ASMS AND THE MAP in Poland she has produced almost no impres- sion at all. The Eussian Empire was thus brought down into Central Europe, becoming a wes- tern Power in a sense that had not been the case before. Ancient Muscovy had hardly entered into the calculations of European statesmen, but now Eussia included territory that in any question affecting the Continent as a whole could by no possibility be ignored. The population of the Baltic Provinces (Esthonia, Livonia, and Courland) is extremely mixed, consisting largely of Esthonians and Lithuanians (with the closely aUied Letts) and a considerable element of Germans.* The Esthonians are related to the Finns, a pre- Aryan race that has occupied the district from prehistoric times. They are chiefly Protestant in faith. Lithuania was once a very power- ful State whose territory stretched from the most estimable person of Mongol race, as Eussian as if bred in Petrograd. * Kiga was settled from Bremen about 1162. wt RUSSIA 97 Baltic to Crimea. The language is so primi- tive that it has been proposed to find in this area the long-sought cradle of the Aryan race. The view seems open to the gravest doubt, as it rather ignores the fact that a colony may not infrequently preserve an older form of speech than the mother country. It is claimed that the mountaineers of Virginia and Carolina speak a form of Enghsh nearer the Ehzabethan speech than is anywhere else to be heard ; South African Taal appears to preserve an older form of the rather vulgar tongue of Holland than any that the Nether- lands still know. There is no doubt what- ever that Icelandic is the eldest variety of Scandinavian speech.* The district was held once by the Teutonic Knights, and Germans form the wealthier asses both in country and in town. The * One of the chief products of Lithuanian literature, the "Seasons" of Donalitius (1714-80), is well enough known to be outlined in A. C. L. Botta's " Hand -Book of Universal Literature." 98 AEMS AND THE MAP Kussians have to a considerable extent managed to assimilate the more ancient ele- ments in the population, largely from the fact that there is no venerable culture of importance to stand in the way. This is not the case in Finland, which is inhabited by a race allied to the Lapps and Esthonians, a remnant with the Basques of the pre-Aryan population of Europe. During the long centuries of Swedish rule (p. 194) the Finns became entirely indoctrinated with the civiHsation of Scandinavia, and in the effort to assimilate them to the widely different ideals of Muscovy their Eussian masters have had most indifferent success. There is still a large Swedish population in Finland (about 400,000), and in the Aland Islands at the entrance to the Gulf of Bothnia, almost oppo- site Stockholm itself, Eussia holds a purely Swedish archipelago with a population entirely Scandinavian. This part of Sweden was seized with Finland in 1809. i I RUSSIA 99 In the frozen far north of Great Russia, the wide steppes between Lapland and the Urals, there are sundry non-Russian races, scanty rehcs of ancient tribes, but not in such numbers as to cause any problem (p. 225). Russia is on the whole a well-compacted land which has assimilated most aHen races within her bounds, but not Germans, Swedes, Poles, Finns, or Romanians. Though centri- fugal forces do exist, they are certainly a remote danger on the whole. There is both in Galicia (p. 133) and in the Russian south a party of Ukrainophils who desire to raise an independent flag, perhaps to found a republic, stretching from the Carpathians to the Caucasus, comprising the old border lands, or Ukraine,* between Poland and Russia and rim Tatary. The district is vaguely defined, * According to one account, Germany and Austria, victorious, plan (or planned) to set up two buffer States between Russia and themselves, Poland and Ruthenia or Ukraine. In some respects undoubtedly G 2 100 ARMS AND THE MAP but more or less it corresponds with Little Russia, whose folk are most akin to the Ruthenians of Galicia. It passed to the dominions of the Tsars in 1667 and 1693. The Russia of to-day looms vast and vague through such an atmosphere of drifting mists as is exhaled by the novels of Ivan Turgenev. Politically no doubt the future of other Great Powers may be in question. But what is really most interesting here is the future of the Russian mind. Perhaps in very truth a national renaissance may be at hand. It is not easy to speak with much enthusiasm about the government of Russia in past years. Yet there are many signs that, if this people were set free, if there were the same hberty of public meeting and education as is enjoyed by countries further west, if the Duma were entrusted with true power, there might come the Ruthenians are a different people from the Russians proper. RUSSIA 101 from this wide land contribution of real wortK to the solution of the tangiod'jirobymB that' so perplex the whole world of European race. CHAPTEE VI THE^^BALKAN STATES In the Spanish peninsula far west, one nation was conquered by the Moslems and quite other nations had emerged when after eight hundred years the Mohammedans had been driven forth. The best known of them has its name from the castles that were only called into being by the endless wars. In the Balkan peninsula far east the nations that other disciples of the Prophet subdued lived on to become liberated in our own time and, as it were, to continue their national hfe at the point where it was violently cut off. There is no need of any further witness to the abiding strength of the institutions of Rome. Otherwise it would be abundantly suppHed by the land of Romania, still bearing THE BALKAN STATES 103 the name, and speaking a later variety of the language, of the former Mistress of the World. Though not one of the Balkan States, this eastern land of Rome is geographically very closely associated with them. The fierce Dacians, dwelling beyond the Danube, had been stalwart enemies of the Empire, con- stantly invading its province of Moesia, which partly corresponded with the Bulgaria of to-day. They were subdued by Trajan in 106 A.D. in wars shown on the bas-rehefs of his Coluimi at Rome, where are very interest- ing pictures of the Dacian huts. He set up a new province, called Dacia, between the Danube and the Dniester, stretching inland to the Carpathian mountains. After little more than a century and a half of Roman rule the district was abandoned by Aurehan, the emperor who built the walls of Rome ; this in 270 a.d. But in that short time Dacia had become so Roman that thus it still remains to-day, despite the flood of 104 AEMS AND THE MAP Slavdom that has swirled and swirled over its surface, despite the unnumbered barbarian hordes that have tramped over and over its soil. The Dacians mingled with the Eoman settlers and soon were proud to speak their tongue, to loll in their loggias and baths, and otherwise to enjoy the life of their towns. This could hardly have happened had they possessed any culture of their own, but they were eminently teachable barbarians. Hero- dotus calls them ** the bravest and most honourable of all the Thracian tribes." Perhaps had they remained longer within the Empire Latin influence might have been less, for the whole of the eastern section became virtually Greek in all its latter days. Eomania has preserved Eoman institutions and a form of the Latin tongue in one of the last corners of the Empire where we should have looked for anything of the kind, cut off in fact by the whole extent of the Austrian dominions from any other Latin Power. No THE BALKAN STATES 105 doubt the Slavic deluge has left its deep mark on her race, but the important fact is that she has kept at any rate her language and her culture and still glories in being a Latin Power. Even over Italy herself many alien races have wandered about since Imperial days, nor is the proud name of Eoman at all less appro- priate if many who bear it are partly of other blood. Neither is Eomania one whit the less a Latin Power because she belongs to the Eastern Church. For a century or so past her students have resorted in numbers to Paris as to the chief central point of Latin culture to-day. Two sections into which this eastern pro- vince of Eome had long been rent, Wallachia and Moldavia, came together in 1859. Romanian soldiers gave great help to Russia before the Turkish stronghold of Plevna in 1877. Their country was next year recog- nised entirely independent of Turkish power — which it practically was before — and this 106 ARMS AND THE MAP formal freedom was bought at a great price. No corner was left to Eomania of the Bessara- bian lands between the Pruth and the Dniester (chief town Kishineff), much of which had been ceded to Moldavia (while still under the suzerainty of Turkey) in 1856 by the Treaty of Paris which ended the Crimean War. As a sorry compensation for the seizure of these fertile lands Eussia, at the expense of Turkey, endowed the Romanian State with the coast flats of Dobrudja, stretching along the Black Sea shore southward from the mouths of the Danube, a district hardly Romanian by race. There are thus two patches of Bomania irredenta, a section of Bukovina and other Carpathian uplands, with most of Eastern Hungary (Transylvania), now covered by the Austrian flag, and the rich black lands of Bessarabia, which is part of the Empire of Russia * (pp. 139, 93). * Approximately there are fourteen million Roma- nians in the world ; they are thus considerably more THE BALKAN STATES 107 Romania's somewhat restricted coast line was lengthened by a few miles when at the end of the Balkan War of 1912-13, as a reward for neutrality, Bulgaria ceded to her the Sihstria district, a small triangle by the sea just south of the flats of Dobrudja, an area to which she had little claim on the score of race. Except perhaps from the presence of many Jews, Romania has no very formidable race problems of her own, though she possesses small communities of Magyars and Germans. Numbers of her own people, largely shep- herds, are sprinkled through the former province of Macedonia, where they are known numerous than the Magyars. All but the Vlachs — some nine hundred thousand scattered through the Balkan peninsula — live in a compact mass ; about eight million in their own kingdom, three and a half million in the Austrian Empire, one and a half million in Russia, where they form about half the population of Bessarabia, Jews coming next among the races of that area. There is thus the possibility of the formation of a really powerful State, but it could not take in all the Romanians without also including a large number of Magyars and Germans (p. 140). 108 ARMS AND THE MAP as Vlachs,* but they are not in such numbers, nor so near her own territory, as might cause Romania seriously to covet their lands. They have to some extent been absorbed by the Greeks. The Bulgars were hordes of Turanian bar- barians who during the seventh century first appeared to confound the confusion of the race groups of South-Eastern Europe. They had strong arms but few ideas, and so it was inevitable that, like all other barbarian con- querors, they should gradually become assimi- lated with the conquered among whom they settled. Learning to speak the tongue of the southern Slavs, they contributed to the mixed nation not very much more than the name — much as the German Pranks in Gaul, or the Scandinavian Russians among the northern Slavs. ♦ There is an excellent account of them in "The Nomads of the Balkans : . . . Vlachs of Northern Pindus." By A. J. B. Wace and M. S. Thompson THE BALKAN STATES 109 They carried on weary wars against the Empire of New Borne, whence eventually they derived their faith. Constantinople had long been the chief centre of the learning of the Greeks, but it was an outpost fortress of civihsation on the edge of barbarian lands, whose people were dazzled by the glittering culture it held up before their eyes. Bulgaria had become a powerful State : her armies had overrun a larger area than is covered by her flag to-day and had camped against the great city on the Bosphorus her- self, but in 1330 she fell under Serbian supremacy, and before the end of the same century, weakened by every kind of internal feud, passed under Turkish rule. To the Bulgarian — as it is convenient to call the race of mixed Slav and Bulgar stock — the new Asiatic invader was less aHen than to the other Balkan Christian folk. A certain amount of (Methuen). Their conclusion is that they are ancient hill tribes, Romanised under the later empire. 110 AEMS AND THE MAP friendly intercourse sprang up, and a new division was created when a considerable number of Bulgarians embraced Islam ; the descendants of these are known as Pomaks right up to the present day.* Eussia de- signed to set up a big Bulgaria by the Treaty of San Stefano in 1878. Prom the Black Sea to the Albanian Hills and from the Danube to the iEgean the whole race (and a good many others) were to be brought together under a single rule. On account, however, of a fear (which events have certainly proved ground- less) that Bulgaria would regard herself as a sort of vestibule to the Empire of the Tsars, the other Powers intervened, and by the Treaty of Berlin restored most of the area to Turkey, making Eastern Eumelia autono- mous. This was so little to the taste of its people that they united their province to * That is, helpers to the Turkish forces. (There were converts to Islam from all the other Christian races, who are frequently called Turks.) THE BALKAN STATES 111 Bulgaria in 1885. Victory in a war with Serbia, the striking abilities of the statesman Stamboloff, and (in 1887) the fortunate elec- tion to the throne of Ferdinand of Saxe- Coburg-Gotha, all combined to give genuine stability to the newly resurrected State. It became entirely independent in 1908, when the prince repudiated Turkish supremacy and assumed the ancient Slavic title of Tsar. Unlike their rather aristocratic Eomanian neighbours, the Bulgarians form a nation of peasant proprietors without any nobility at all. Jews are much more highly appreciated than is the case in Eomania and Russia. As a result of the Balkan War Bulgaria gained a considerable extension of territory, including a coast line on the i3Egean (with the harbour of Porto Lago) in addition to her old one on the Black Sea, thus possessing a great advan- tage over Eomania, whose shore is only to be reached through the Dardanelles. But on the other hand their success in the 112 ARMS AND THE MAP second Balkan War (1913) enabled Serbia and Greece to annex a considerable Bulgarian population to the east of Albania (p. 120), while Turkey contrived to recover Adrianople, and with it a fairly large section of Thrace that would otherwise have passed to the rulers of Sophia (p. 169). That these mis- fortunes were brought about very largely by Bulgarian mismanagement has in no way decreased the bitter sense of wrong. The races of Macedonia are so inextricably mixed that it is most difficult to draw any definite lines, though the large number of Bulgarians under Serbian rule is a most cer- tain cause of future trouble.* The differences between the various Slavic, or semi-Slavic, peoples are not very deep-seated, although in the case of Bulgaria the matter is complicated * In the event of Serbia gaining a considerable exten- sion of territory with a population akin to her own in the north, it would certainly be in the general interest that she should sell the more definitely Bulgarian districts in the south to her eastern neighbour. THE BALKAN STATES 113 by the fact that, on account of a purely poU- tical dispute about the nationahty of bishops and other officers, her ancient Church was excommunicated by the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople in 1870, a lunatic proceeding. The Bulgarian clergy have at present an Exarch of their own in New Kome and repu- diate the Patriarch's authority, though not separated by the most trifling theological divergence. As a rule, however, there is a distinct tendency for the Balkan races to accommodate themselves to the political lines either by gradually accepting the language and other institutions of the country in which they are, or by wandering over the frontier to join their own kindred elsewhere. For Thrace and Macedonia having known little of settled conditions for two or three centuries past, their people are accustomed to migration as Western Europeans are not. To the operation of such forces, however, a limit must obviously exist, and serious 114 AEMS AND THE MAP problems of nationality threaten to remain in- definitely unsolved, especially since the very arbitrary division of the spoils of the Balkan War. As Professor Harte, of Harvard, tersely puts it * : ** No geographical boundary line can be made to fit with these race-groups. The effort to adjust the matter by killing off villagers of different race from that of the conqueror of a region was so thorough-going as to shock mankind, but not drastic enough to solve the problem." The general misery of Macedonia is rather strikingly and quaintly expressed by a Bul- garian saying to the effect that God cannot really be sinless inasmuch as He created the World. The Serbs, of Slavic race comparatively un- mixed, first appear in history in what are now Serbia and Montenegro during the sixth cen- tury of our era. They did nothing epecially worthy of remark, however, till in the twelfth * Writing in World's Work, September, 1914. THE BALKAN STATES 115 century their power wao consolidated by a rather picturesque monarch of a strongly religious disposition, known as Stephen Nemanja, who accepted for himself and his people the orthodox faith of Constantinople. This did not mean, however, that he was prepared to obey the Emperor of the East. He entertained the Emperor of the West so magnificently that Frederick Barbarossa changed his opinion of the civihsation of that part of the world, and King Stephen ended his varied career as a monk on Mount Athos (p. 191). Under Stephen Dusan (1336-56) Serbia attained high power. Her sovereign emu- lated all great rulers of the past by patronis- ing literature and promulgating a code of laws, but the wide dominions which he acquired were neither well organised nor solidly compacted, for government on any large scale was never the strong point of the Slav. Even midst the gathering clouds of the H 2 116 AEMS AND THE MAP coming Turkish storm the Eastern Christians refused efl&ciently to unite. The result was that in 1389 a great army of Serbs, Bosnians, and Albanians received a shattering blow on the field of Kossovo and all southern Slavdom soon lay prostrate at the feet of the self- styled Shadow of God. All but a small remnant, the noblest of th( Serbs, who retreating into the fastnesses oi Tsernagora commenced that age-long defenci of the Black Mountain against the Turk whicl placed Montenegro on the map of Europe, the] only land of the whole south-east that nevei knew a Turkish lord. As Tennyson wrote in| 1877 :— *' They rose to where their sovran eagle j sails. They kept their faith, their freedom, onj the height, Chaste, frugal, savage, armed by day and] night Against the Turk ; whose inroad nowhere] scales Their headlong passes, but his footstep] fails, THE BALKAN STATES 117 And red with blood the Crescent reels from fight Before their dauntless hundreds, in prone flight By thousands down the crags and through the vales. smallest among peoples ! rough rock- throne Of Freedom ! warriors beating back the swarm Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years, Great Tsernagora ! never since thine own Black ridges drew the cloud and broke the storm Has breathed a race of mightier moun- taineers." Elsewhere the Crescent was triumphant, and despite the gallant fight of Janos Hun- yady, the Hungarian champion of the Cross (p. 161), the resistance of the Slav collapsed, and in 1459 Serbia was incorporated as a Turkish province. Many of her people fled into Hungary for refuge, one source of the large Slav population of that land (p. 135). At the end of the eighteenth century the emancipation of Serbia began under an illi- 118 AEMS AND THE MAP terate peasant named Kara George, grand- father of Peter, the present King.* He was distinctly of the type known in America as a *' pretty tough citizen." On different occa- sions he shot his father and killed his brother as a hint that he intended to have his own way. He spoilt a foreign decoration he was wearing while making some repairs to a tub. When the Serbian Senate was not to his mind he arranged for its debating with the muzzles of his soldiers' guns suggestively thrust in through the windows all round the chamber in which the august legislators were sitting. Bosnia and Herzegovina are very kindred Slavic lands, which formed part of the old Serbian Empire, and it is extremely natural that the Serbs, conscious of returning power and animated by rekindled ambitions, should be determined to possess them again. The * The Karageorgeovitch Dynasty has alternated with that founded by Milosh Obrenovitch, the leader in the second Serbian war of liberation, 1815. Milan, of the latter house, took the title of king in^l882. THE BALKAN STATES 119 Austrians have for decades attempted to throttle this Eenaissance of Serb nationaUty and to prevent the rebuildmg of the dominion of the southern Slavs. By seizing Cattaro they shut out Montenegro, the nation of the old Serb nobihty, from her natural seaport, permitting her only Antivari * and other coast villages further south. By preserving the sanjak of Novibazar, a strip of Turkish territory stretching up to their own frontier between Serbia and Montenegro, they pre- vented any close intercourse between the Serbs of the plains and the Serbs of the moun- tains until the barrier was inevitably swept away by the triumph of the Christian forces in the Balkan War. Further to confine their neighbours and to prevent their expansion toward the north, the Austrians in 1908 annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, although the Treaty of Berlin * This little port is named from being opposite to Bari in Italy, where the body of St. Nicholas is enshrined. 120 AEMS AND THE MAP permitted them merely to administer those lands in the name of the Khalif of Islam. By the Balkan War the Serbs secured in Macedonia all the territory they could reason- ably claim, including the district of old Serbia with the famous city of Skoplie or Uskub, with all its associations of their former power. In fact, in the south they secured districts that, even with the vigorous and unhappy coercion law they at once put in force, can hardly be made truly Serbian (p. 112). From her natural outlet to the Adriatic Sea,* however, Serbia was barred by the Aus- trians, wherein they did great folly and wrong, bottHng up the powder that was to explode into the Great Mad War. The people in whose interests this was osten- sibly done were the Shkypetars or Albanians, * Serbia's obvious seaport (except racially) would have been Durazzo, the ancient Epidamnus, a dispute concerning which between Corinth and Coroyra was a chief cause of the Peloponnesian War, by which the civilisation of Greece was half destroyed. Absit omen. THE BALKAN STATES 121 an ancient, honourable race, claiming descent from the Pelasgi and certainly more or less identical with the Illyrians of old, and thus the countrymen in some degree of Pyrrhus, Diocletian, and Constantino the Great.* A people with a great history behind them, yet hardly a nation — except when diplomacy requires that so they must be deemed — for they are much mixed up with other races and themselves split into hostile clans. Their great hero Scanderbeg (Alexander Lord), under whom they were in revolt against the Turks 1443-67, was in truth of Serbian stock. They formed great part of the motley forces that freed the soil of Greece from its Moslem over- lord, and their exceedingly picturesque cos- tume is familiar to-day both in the cities and the fields of Greece. They make up a respec- table proportion of the population of that kingdom, both on the mainland and in the islands. * Though the last was born at Nish in Serbia. 122 ARMS AND THE MAP That some, at any rate, of the Albanians have convictions of their own, and with them a strong desire to manage their own affairs, is apparent from a remark made to E. F. Knight as long ago as 1880 * : *' Our object is to defend our countries against the enemies that surround us. The dogs of Montenegrin, the Servian and Greek swine, all wish to steal a portion of Albania, but praise to Allah, we are strong. The Albanians are brave and guns and ammunition are not wanting." The Albanians are perhaps the only Euro- pean population on which the Turks have left any considerable impression, the only Western race who in any significant number have passed over from Christianity to Islam. But how far the former faith ever really possessed them is a matter of very great uncertainty. There are still many Christians among them ; * Reported in his book *' Albania," published tbat year. The case for Albanian nationality is set forth in Wadham Peacock's " Albania, the Foundling State of Europe," 1914. I THE BALKAN STATES 123 the Mirdites in the north adhere to the Church of Rome, the southern clans respect the autho- rity of the Church of Constantinople. Thus, in these virile latitudes, where most agree that for stubborn unbehevers there is no argument like the sword, the people in the neighbour- hood of Scodra * have their intense hostility to the Montenegrins sharpened by religious hate. This being absent further south, the Albanians are less unfriendly to the Greeks. It may well be doubted whether the Alba- nians have much advanced since they were the subjects of the Empire of Eome. In one thing at least they can all agree : they will not obey a German prince foisted upon them by European Powers. Things in their part of the world are dis- tinctly made more complicated by the fact that Italy has some racial claim to the district of Valona, the second seaport of Albania (p. 156). * Better known, perhaps, as Scutari. 124 ARMS AND THE MAP The frontiers of the new Albanian kingdom have also been very unfortunately drawn, leaving numerous Albanians under the rule of the hated Serbs, and ignoring local conditions to such an extent that many country people find themselves cut off from their market towns.* * Many interesting particulars are given in Edith Dui'ham's "The Struggle for Scutari (Turk, Slav, Albanian)," 1914. CHAPTER VII THE AUSTRIAN EMPIRE It was the marriage of Ferdinand I., Arch- duke and Emperor (brother of Charles V.), with the Princess Anna of Hungary and Bohemia, in 1521, that gave to the world this weird Dual Monarchy, perhaps the most varied, miscellaneous, and ill-assorted col- lection of States, occupying contiguous terri- tory and ruled by a single sovereign, to be read of in the story of mankind. There is really no dominant race, there is no regular federal system,* no great outstand- ing city, in which the nations have a common pride, nothing round which patriotism and loyalty can rally, unless it be the person of * For the Pragmatic Sanction of 1723 and the Com' promise of 1867 can hardly be said to be such. 126 AEMS AND THE MAP the sovereign, the representative of the great House of Hapsburg of imperial fame. Until the Treaty of Pressburg in 1805 it might have been arguably claimed that the ruler of this quaint medley of nationalities was the true and lawful inheritor of the greatest tradition of Europe, holder of the highest place on earth, monarch of the Holy Roman Empire, suc- cessor of the Caesars of old. But when the tattered, threadbare, and utterly unrecognis- able relic of the once glorious robe of imperial purple had been handed to the great Napoleon — who planned to wear it himself, new-made with the best fabrics of France — the head of the House of Hapsburg became merely the ruler of Austria, with other possessions besides. The Holy Eoman Empire Voltaire had flippantly declared to be entirely misnamed on the ground that it was not holy, that it had really nothing on earth to do with the former Mistress of the World, and that in no true THE AUSTRIAN EMPIRE 127 sense was it an empire at all. But at the very- least it was ancient and had a great history. In the Empire of Austria now substituted Freeman could see nothing but a brand new sham. He was so contemptuous that he . wrote ** empire " in inverted commas. But this seems to be going too far, though after the expulsion of Austria from Germany in 1866 — ^result of Sadowa — ^lier ruler was really no more than Archduke of the Eastern March, King of Hungary, and lord of all sorts of httle States. No part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is detached from the rest, or seriously shut off by geographical boundaries,* but, with the exceptions of Hungary and Bohemia, the present dominions of the Hapsburg House contain mere samples and patches of races, without including the whole of any that is not of rather secondary importance. Almost * Except that Galicia (Austrian Poland) is on the far side of the Carpathians. 128 AEMS AND THE MAP nowhere do the political frontiers of this eccen- tric monarchy correspond with true boun- daries of races or nationalities. The person who passes out from the Empire will nowhere find himself among people of another race and different ideals unless it is over certain fron- tiers of Eomania or of Italy that he goes. Again, there is no land whatever whose terri-, tory marches with Austria-Hungary that may not feel that some of her own people are by it cut off from their kin. The Empire has hardly a single frontier of which a firm reason can be given why it should be placed where it is more appropriately than anywhere else. Long- continued encroachments into Slavdom have caused Slavs of one kind or another to be a far larger proportion of the whole population than either German or Magyar. The conflict between Teuton and Slav, which has been the chief disturbing feature of the politics of Eastern Europe in recent times, is a legacy from the middle ages, THE AUSTRIAN EMPIRE 129 although on the whole racial feeling was in those days rather less intense than now. During the thirteenth century Austria passed under the rule of Ottokar, King of Bohemia, a Slavic monarch, whose short-lived conquests right up to the Baltic shore are commemorated to this day by the town of Konigsberg, which he founded, but which has long been a firm stronghold of Germans. It was a great centre of the Teutonic Knights, the seat of the Grand Masters 1457—1525. The Eastern March did not really begin to be of much importance until in 1282 it was acquired by the great House that takes a name from its original seat of Hapsburg, within the present limits of Switzerland. The house gradually overshadowed all the other royal families of Europe and gained the Empire itself as a hereditary possession. The German capital — if so definite a term may be allowed — ^had gradually been pushed towards the rising sun from Aachen through Frankfort on 130 AEMS AND THE MAP the Main * to Vienna. So entirely did the imperial title seem to belong to the head of the great House that when the Holy Eoman Empire ceased, and he was in fact merely Archduke of Austria, King of Hungary, of Bohemia, and of other realms, he seemed automatically to become Emperor of the Eastern March. It seemed inconceivable that Vienna should cease to be the seat of imperial power. It is a most difl&cult, but still a necessary, task to sketch the distribution of the races in Austria-Hungary to-day. Austria proper with Northern Tyrol, Salzburg, and most of Carinthia and Styria are German, almost as much so as Bavaria, which they adjoin. The Danube, which washes Ulm and Eegensburg and Vienna, is a purely German stream till it flows into Hungary to traverse the lands of the Magyar, and then the realms of the Slav and the Eomanian. German too are the ♦ Wliere the emperors were elected. THE AUSTEIAN EMPIRE 131 borderlands of Bohemia and Moravia, where they march, along the Mountains of Erz, with Saxony herself. Elsewhere in the Empire Germans live in very numerous small and more or less isolated communities,* thickly sprinkled over Hun- gary right up to (and in fact beyond) the borders of Eomania (looking on the map rather like patches of oil in water), far fewer in Galicia and Carniola ; in Slavonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina almost none at all. Thus the German community in Trieste is by no means united with Austria proper by any continuous population of Germans, though the distance is not far between. Trieste had been claimed both by the RepubHc of Venice and by the Patriarch of Aquileia ; for a time it enjoyed some measure of independence, but * There are well over nine million Germans in Austria, over two million more in Hungary. The approximate grouping of the races is shown in the frontispiece map. According to the census of 1910 the Germans of the Empire number 12,010,000, Magyars 10,067,000, and Slavs 24,183,000. I 2 132 ARMS AND THE MAP in 1382 it accepted the suzerainty of the Duke of Austria, who was naturally eager to get a footing on the Adriatic. This coast is occu- pied largely by Italians, but they are much mixed with Slavs (p. 157). The Elbe rises among the Riesen Gebirge, where German hillmen live, but in the Bohemian plains it flows among a Slavic population and is joined by the Moldau, the river of Prague, before starting on its long course through German lands to flow out into a German sea. The central parts of both Bohemia and Moravia are occupied by Slavs,* who have come largely under Western in- fluences and pertain to the Western Church. Further east is the district of Cracow in Western Galicia, or Austrian Poland, f whose Slavic people (p. 95) are on the whole more contented than their compatriots in Prussia or Russia, chiefly because Austria has had no * About six millions of them. t Polish population about foui* and a half millions. THE AUSTRIAN EMPIRE 133 special motive to interfere with their nation- ahty, and their reUgion is the same as hers. Eastern GaHcia, with its chief town Lemberg or Lvoff, is a purely Slavic land ; by far the greater number of its people are Little Russians, called Ruthenians in order to dis- tinguish them from their kindred in the Russian Empire.* The district was taken from a divided Russia (while still under Mongol domination, p. 85) by the Poles under Casimir the Great in 1340 : it became Austrian in 1772 at the first partition of Poland. Ecclesiastically the Ruthenians remained in communion with their mother Church of the East until the latter part of the sixteenth century, when the PoUsh Government under Jesuit influence sought by every means to induce them to recognise papal supremacy: * Ruthenian is a Latinised form of Russian ; it seems not to have been used for more than about sixty years. There are some three and a half millions of Ruthenians in Galicia, besides about a million Jews and some two hundred thousand Germans. The native princely house of Halich (GaJicia) had died out in 1340. 134 AEMS AND THE MAP thus instituting the Uniat Church, to which most of the people now belong. Persistent efforts to substitute ordinary Eoman services for the ancient liturgy of the East have, how- ever, been greatly resented, and there is little doubt that the great bulk of the Euthenians would gladly return to the Orthodox Church if political pressure were withdrawn.* Many of them probably would welcome reunion with the Eussian Empire (but see p. 99). Under Austrian administration their government is largely in the hands of Poles, who have no objection to the traditional pohcy of the Empire in seeking to bring adherents of the Eastern Church into the fold of Eome. Other peoples, Eomanian and Slav, vir- tually surround the great mass of the Magyars * Anxious to preserve the ancient ritual of their fathers, large numbers of those who have emigiated to America have either joined the Orthodox Church there or have entered into close relations with the Anglican Communion. At the Church of the Advent, Philadelphia, a large congregation of Ruthenians still uses the vener- able service of the East. THE AUSTRIAN EMPIRE 185 in their own land and also shut off from them a second and smaller Magyar commmiity on the border of Romania in the extreme east of Hungary. Thus the Magyars are only about half the population of their own coun- try, and they do not form a compact mass on the ethnological map. In the parts of Hungary towards the sea, in Croatia and Slavonia, besides Bosnia, Herzegovina and Dalmatia, the Slavic population is nearly unbroken by any other race, while Carniola, between Carinthia and the sea, is predomi- nantly of the same Slavic stock. Thus all round the Empire, from the hinterland of Trieste, bordering Montenegro, Serbia, Romania, and Russia to where the Slavic population forms a huge wedge into the German fringe of Bohemia, there are large and extremely important communities of diverse nationality and faith, but all of them Slavic or Romanian. No less than eleven Slav races of Austria-Hungary are 136 AEMS AND THE MAP sufficiently different to be distinguished on the American immigration returns.* The Magyars or Hungarians came into Europe during the ninth century, pagan hordes of Turanian stock, a menace to the newly-dawning culture of the Continent. They were by no means identical with the Huns, though they have been anxious to claim association with them, and the ancient Hun- garian house of Esterhazy is supposed to be descended from Attila. But, unlike the * Bohemiaii, Bosnian, Croatian, Dalmatian, Herze- govinian, Moravian, Pole, Euthenian or Russniak, Slovak (borders of Hungary and Moravia), and Slovenian (in Carinthia, Carniola, Styria, &c.) ; these in addition to Germans, Italians, Magyars, and Romanians. The Bohemians, Moravians, and Slovaks are more usually lumped together as Czechs, a term properly applicable to the first. There are many Slavs in America, where their chief centres are in Pennsylvania and Ohio. John Huss was a Bohemian Czech. His present followers, the United Brethren or Moravians, so well known for their missionary enthusiasm, are very largely Germans ; theii- early records in America at Bethlehem and elsewhere are kept in the German tongue. In Austria the Church uses the Czech and German languages in about equal proportion. Originally it was wholly Slav and largely identified with Bohemian nationalism. THE AUSTRIAN EMPIRE 137 Turks, in later days they had no very fixed ideas either as to the truth of any particular religion, or as to the excellence of any particular form of civilisation. So when St. Stephen,* their earliest king (997—1038), embraced the faith of the Western Church and with it European ways, they made no difl&culty about acquiescing. Thus early did Hungary take her place among the Western Powers. After five hundred years she in her turn was threatened by Asiatic invaders, and for a season a great part of her soil was under the power of the Sultan of Turkey. When in the seventeenth century independence was com- * His views about alien races are (unfortunately) by no means shared by tbe present Magyars : " Treat the newcomers well, and hold them in honour, for they bring fresh knowledge and arms into the country ; they are an ornament and support of the Throne, for a country where only one language and one custom prevails, is weak and fragile." The latter sentence is open to dis- cussion, but the persistent efforts to bring about the complete Magyaration of Hungary have been most unfortunate in every way. 138 ARMS AND THE MAP pletely regained, German settlement was encouraged, partly with a view to binding the land more closely to the Empire, which had been unable to shield it from the Turks. The Magyar rising of 1848, under Louis Kossuth, was suppressed for Austria by Russia's sword (for the insurgents showed themselves hostile to the Slavs), but practi- cally all for which the gun was shouldered has later on been gained. In 1861, after the con- cession of various rights about freedom of language and religion, the old constitution was restored : Hungary, including Transyl- vania, Croatia, and Slavonia, regained her national Parliament.* After the expulsion of Austria from Germany in 1866, the Dual Monarchy was organised on the existing lines, each nation (German and Magyar) having equal rights. Francis Joseph was crowned * There is a separate diet at Agram for Croatia and Slavonia, with Dalmatia, which sends forty-three members to the Hungarian Parliament, and the Hun- garian Ministry always includes a Croat. THE AUSTEIAN EMPIRE 139 King of Hungary that there might be no mistake. Reference will be made in the chapter about Italy to the different patches of territory within the Austrian Empire where consider- able numbers of Italians are living — mixed with Germans and Slavs — that form Italia irredenta (p. 154). Another Latin race on the far frontier of the State feels a similar grievance against the Dual Monarchy. The wide plains of Transyl- vania (though geographically part of Hungary and chiefly draining into the Theiss, while separated by the Transylvanian Alps from Romania) are chiefly peopled by Romanians, and Southern Bukovina, forming an Austrian wedge into their own country, is occupied by the same race.* Many in the kingdom are naturally extremely keen about the recovery * Bukovina is a mountain country among the Car- pathians which was taken from Turkey by Austria in 1775. The people of its northern part, adjoining Galicia, are Ruthenian (p. 91). 140 ARMS AND THE MAP of this Romania irredenta. As long ago as 1891-92 there was formed a ** League for the Cultural Unity of all Romanians," which has recently been displaying strong Irredentist tendencies.* For such a State as Austria-Hungary one would hardly expect to find any true national feeling. Almost the whole Empire is from time to time convulsed by the eternal Irredentist agitations, and perhaps only a minority of the people would regret the cleavage of the dominion into its component parts. Probably it would have surprised Ferdinand (p. 125) that so accidental a union * By electing on its committee such well-known nationalists as the poet Goga and Dr. Lucaci. The question of Eomania irredenta is complicated by the fact that if all the Eomanians of Transylvania rejoined their brethren in the kingdom they would enclose a very large number of Magyars and Germans ; and also by the connec- tion with the Kaiser's House of the dynasty of Hohen- zollern Sigmaringen. Besides parts of Transylvania and Bukovina the chief Romanian districts of the Empire are the areas of Marmaros Sziget, Temesvar, and Krischana. THE AUSTRIAN EMPIRE 141 of discordant atoms should last at any rate for close on four hundred years. Real genius in statesmanship might have given to the much-mixed State the same kind of unity that it is the glory of Switzerland to have achieved. But the difficulties would have been of a much more formidable kind. The general pohcy that the Empire has actually pursued is suggested fairly well by the often quoted remark of Francis II. to the French Ambassador at the Congress of Vienna : " My people do not understand each other and hate each other. Their antipathies make for security and their mutual hatreds for the general peace." * Supposing that all Irredentist claims were secured, if Austria proper and the other * Bismarck expressed it rather neatly during 1867 : " Austria is like a house built of bad bricks, which, how- ever, are kept together by an excellent cement — ^her German population." Private interview with W. B. Kingston, published in the Daily Telegraph, 12th January, 1915. 142 ARMS AND THE MAP purely German lands returned to the Father- land with which history and geography con- nect them, if Western Galicia were restored to Poland, if Eastern Galicia and northern Bukovina went to Russia, Southern Bukovina and most of Transylvania to Romania, if Bosnia with Herzegovina and perhaps part of Dalmatia were secured by Serbia, and at any rate Southern Tyrol by Italy, there would still remain the great mass of Hungary * and most of Bohemia and Moravia. If Hungary were to preserve her access to the sea, she must retain very numerous Slavic subjects in Croatia f and Slavonia to the south-west ; if she were to keep all her own * It is quite possible that Hungary might be separated peacefully from Austria by the fact that the late heir -apparent to both Thrones, Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Este (murdered at Saraievo in June, 1914), left children by a morganatic marriage, who could not succeed to the throne of Austria though they might to that of Hungary. t On the other hand, the Slavs might put in a strong plea for an independent Croatia. THE AUSTRIAN EMPIRE 143 Magyars, she must still rule a certain number of Romanians to the east. The restoration of the ancient kingdom of Bohemia would be vastly facilitated if she actually possessed the sea coast which Shake- speare assigns to her in the ** Winter's Tale." Unfortunately Uncle Toby's remark in " Tristram Shandy " (in answer to Corporal Trim), that the King of Bohemia could not well have any port as there is no sea near, accurately represents the difficulty. The Slavic community is almost surrounded by a German population. The German realms would be shut out from that sea to which they have so long had access if the old Venetian shore — much the smaller of the two main portions of Italia irredenta — were to be restored to the dominion of Rome, even if they still preserved the predominantly Slav territory of Carniola. The difficulty might perhaps be got over by some sort of neutralisation, but it is further compHcated 144 ARMS AND THE MAP by the fact that the population even of the shore is by no means Itahan unmixed. In redrawing the map of Europe after the Great Mad War nationahty may be a most admirable guide, but it must always be re- membered that, even if it were possible to consider the frontiers of the whole Continent anew, it would be physically out of the ques- tion to carve it up entirely by nations, and further that even if that could be done there would be but a qualified guarantee of peace.* Apart from such considerations as strategic * A United States of Europe, though in many ways desirable, must for generations remain in cloudland ; the only really hopeful way of helping to preserve peace for the immediate future of Europe seems to be the increase in every possible manner of the scope and prestige of the Hague Tribunal. In the interests of world peace it certainly appears that a glorious step forward would be made by the federation of the English- speaking nations on the basis of mutual defence against all attacks and a mutual guarantee of the most public kind that (possessing in all conscience an ample share of God's earth) they would annex no further land. The smaller the scope of the federal authority the more effective it would probably be. THE AUSTRIAN EMPIRE 145 science and access to the sea (which are Hkely to enter into the question to an enormous extent, and in places so important as Constan- tinople), no more than a very rude approxi- mation to national frontiers can in the nature of things be made in the south-east. Men in their tens of thousands must clearly have diverse nationality and race. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the complicated nature of the problem. Even the tiny States so common in the middle ages could not manage things otherwise where small towns and villages are cloven into two or three by the barriers of race.* It is remarkable that, in an age so tolerant in many things as this, race feehng should almost everywhere have been so strongly intensified during the past half-century, * Nor is it an absolutely safe assumption that the wishes of the majority of the population of a district would necessarily be for union with a larger section of the same race in close geographical proximity. Luxemburg would almost undoubtedly supply an example to the contrary. 146 AEMS AND THE MAP Where a colour line exists some measure of race consciousness — but not of race anta- gonism — is absolutely essential. No un- biassed person who has witnessed the result of wholesale inter-marriage of white and negro in Portuguese Africa and in northern South America could by any possibility ques- tion it. But as between Teuton and Slav it is impossible to find any such danger. Each has contributed much to the general well- being of man ; and though as a whole the Slav race may be less advanced in civilisation, this certainly does not affect individuals. It is thus difficult to see anything but evil in the wholesale recrudescence of ancient hatreds and the increasingly serious race strains that threaten to tear Europe in pieces and to undermine the very foundations of her culture. It is not very easy to assign any sufficient reason for this stiffening of race antagonism, but few will be found to deny that it is a very serious world problem of to-day. Even THE AUSTEIAN EMPIEE 147 France, so tolerant in nearly every other direction, is almost as strongly impregnated with anti-Semitic feeling as any nation under heaven. So far as Eastern Europe is con- cerned, there is little doubt that one very main element in the new strengthening of race feeling is the attention devoted to the problem of the birth rate, and the realisation that the natural increase of the Slavs is very much greater than that of their Teutonic or Magyar rivals.* * Count Valerian Krasinski, in his " Lectures on the Keligious History of the Slavonic Nations," tells us that in 1846 a Galician peasant accused his landlord of having abused the Emperor in the most violent manner. When the Austrian magistrate asked what word of vilification he uttered, the peasant replied : *' Oh, Sir ! He has made use of the most horrible expressions against the Emperor; he even called him a German." Nothing could better illustrate the intensity of race feeling than I is artless remark. CHAPTEE VIII ITALY A VERY Eoman Italy was a natural result from the position of the peninsula in the centre of the Empire, but it was left very largely to the barbarian Goths to invent the more modern ideal of an Italian Eome. During the middle ages Italy, Kke Germany, palpitated with most vigorous life. North- ward were flourishing free cities, southward rather larger States. And between in either country was a power which failed to be a unifying force largely because of its claim to universal authority. But in this respect at least Italy was far more blessed by Nature than Germany. Her frontiers were the high Alps and the broad seas ; her people were kept to themselves ; she had the most ITALY 149 renowned of all European cities to be her capital, when the day of unity should come. Germany had no frontiers at all ; if her children navigated rivers they set in motion forces that dragged large areas away from whatever common centre might have been ; if they sailed over the seas they built a small nation of their own ; if they lived on any of the marches they became hopelessly inter- locked with men of far different race. And no one city of Germany stood out above the rest, a rallying point for all. The different spirit of north and south, which is noticeable in nearly all European lands, is in Italy intensified by Teutonic immigration into the broad plains of the Po. Much further to the south extended the Long- beards' (or Lombards') power, but not to so great an extent their actual race. Even across the Atlantic the Lombard and Sicilian hardly know each other as fellow-countrymen, so different are their dialects and their 150 AEMS AND THE MAP ideals.* Lombardy, the special home of free cities in days gone by, displays much of the hustle and enterprise of the north ; Calabria and Sicily still preserve something of the spirit of ages past. None the less, when Count Metternich declared that Italy was merely a geographical expression he lied as only politicians lie. The tangled story of Italy and her invaders has been excellently well told by one of our foremost historians, lately passed away.f It is no small triumph of ideals that an Italian nation has now gathered to herself the lands so long fought over by nearly every European race, and so far as the islands are concerned by Saracen as well. Nor has national feeling been helped by such common pride in distant enterprises as did so much to make England a nation during Elizabethan days. Italy was never more hopelessly torn than at the time * Northern and Southern Italians are distinguished on the American immigration papers, t Dr. Thomas Hodgkin. ITALY 151 of the Kenaissance, and though she supphed a brave army of navigators * to the ocean powers, no one of her own States was in a position to fly a flag beyond the Mediterranean. The work of unification was very largely done by one of the greatest men and purest patriots that the nineteenth century knew, born in what is now Prance, trained in guer- rilla warfare by the mouth of the Eio de la Plata, naturalised as an American citizen while living on Staten Island. Garibaldi, whose name seems originally Bavarian,! was born at Nizza ; he was very largely instru- mental in bringing all Italy to the feet of a Koyal House whose title comes from dominions on the Burgundian side of the Maritime Alps and which originally was hardly Itahan at all. The work of consolidating the whole of Italy * Among them Cliristopher Columbus, the Cabots, Verrazano, and Amerigo Vespucci, from whom America was named. t The Bavarians, probably a Suevio tribe, who wandered into the Roman province of Vindelicia, had various monarchs called Garibald. 152 AEMS AND THE MAP under the House of Savoy is even yet not quite complete, but it was to a great extent consummated when in 1870 the Franco-Ger- man war caused the withdrawal of Napo- leon III.'s troops from Eome and permitted the Italian army to march into the only pos- sible capital of their land. But to Garibaldi's most intense disgust the payment to Prance for help in expelling the Austrians from Italy in 1859 was the cession of Savoy and his own city of Nice — to give the French form of its name — so that he became a foreigner where he was born.* It did not, however, prevent his fighting for France when the German war broke out.f Thus was Italy pushed back some distance from her former western border, but in many ways the new frontier, following roughly the line of the Maritime Alps, is more logical than * But a plebiscite was taken, and it was announced that the district had voted itself into France. t While some of his descendants are fighting for her to-day. I ITALY 153 the old. The district ceded was always very closely associated with France, and it is mostly drained by tributaries of the Ehone (p. 38). It includes the miniature State of Monaco (in which is Monte Carlo, of gambhng fame), the semi-independence of whose prince was not affected by the change of suzerain power. The hilly island of Corsica became French in 1768, having previously for four centuries belonged to Genoa, and before that to Pisa. It seems improper that the kindred islands of Corsica and Sardinia, separated only by the narrow strait (of Bonifacio), whose blue waves break in white foam over red rocks with snow- capped hills to the north, should belong to different flags. For the Hfe of the islands is much the same, though poHtically they have been separated through a great part of their history, and in the days of Charles the Great Sardinia belonged to the Eoman Empire of the East, Corsica to the restored Eoman 154 ARMS AND THE MAP Empire of the West. But though speaking different dialects of the Itahan tongue, the more northern island has, as the birthplace of the great Napoleon, almost more associations with France. The islanders are still Buonapar- tists in sympathy to a very large extent, being naturally proud of the great soldier and states- man to whom their small country gave birth. Between 1793 and 1796, at the time of the Paoh revolt, the island was under British control. There is no strong feeling in Italy to-day about these French lands, to which the penin- sula might have an arguable claim ; they belong to another Latin country with which Italy has usually been friendly — there was nothing humiliating in the manner of their acquisition by France. Nor is there any bad blood concerning the Swiss Canton of Ticino, or British Malta. Extremely different is the feeling about Italia irredenta, the parts of Italy still under Austrian control, which the ItaUans yearn to get back. They include ITALY 155 a large patch of fertile mountain land and a considerable strip of coast. Trentino, or the district round the town of Trent, and in fact all the southern portion of Tyrol are not only Italian in feeling, language and race, but the area forms a considerable Austrian dent extending into Italy as far as the Largo di Garda ; it is land drained largely by the Adige, an Italian stream.* Austrian attempts to crush the Italian feeling of the district have produced but Httle effect, and it seems to be simply a pernicious accident that the country is not ruled from Eome. Likewise Italian on the whole, but somewhat mixed with Slav, is the population of the great seaport of Trieste, of the once great patriarchal city of Aquileia and of the coast lands along the head of the Adriatic, including great part of the peninsula of Istria.f (In these parts is the place of * And it forms a sort of Austrian sally-port piercing the Alps into the Italian plains. t So also to some extent the seaport of Zara. The relations between Venice and Trieste are very close in 156 AEMS AND THE MAP meeting of the three great races — Teuton, Latin, Slav.) Largely Italian Hkewise are the islands off the Dalmatian shore, where men still speak nearly as the ancient Eomans spoke, and so in part is the district of Valona (Anion) on the coast of Albania, just over the Strait of Otranto. But while the reunion to Italy of the southern part of Tyrol would merely sever a corner of the Austrian dominions, causing no particular inconvenience to the rest, if the coast strip by Trieste, Venetian once, went back to its Italian mother-land there would be created a sort of Adriatic analogy to the long Alaskan shore that shuts out so much of Canada from the sea ; or, to take a case much many ways. The people of eacli can easily visit the other, especially by Sunday excursion steamers in the summer. More than three-quarters of the people of Trieste are Italian. In a very interesting letter to The Times (23rd April, 1915) K. W. Seton-Watson says " Italy's claim to replace Austria on the eastern Adriatic cannot be realised unless she annexes at least a million Slavs." The Italian population of Dalmatia is only 3 or 4 per cent, of the whole. ITALY 157 nearer, it would resemble the strip of coast, including Cattaro, by which Austria has excluded so much of Montenegro from salt water. For the hinterland of this Italian shore, which might extend from the border of Venetia to the frontier of Hungary, is entirely Slavic and German. The Austrian part of [the Dual Monarchy could have no other outlet fto the sea (p. 132). Such troubles might perhaps be overcome by setting up a free port under the sovereignty of Eome. If Valona and the Dalmatian islands became ItaUan, politically the Adriatic would almost be once more a Latin lake. The very small commonwealth of San Marino remains an interesting relic of the old days of city States ; for it is an in- dependent republic, entirely surrounded by the kingdom of Italy. It has, however, no more political significance than the httle republic of Andorra among the Pyrenees between Prance and Spain or the better- 158 AEMS AND THE MAP known principality of Monaco on the Eiviera shore. Another very small section of the peninsula that is in some sense not within the kingdom is the Vatican with its gardens, and also the Lateran, at Eome. The buildings and art collections are the property of the Italian Government by right of conquest, but the Papacy has been granted ex-territorial rights, and is even permitted to maintain the famous small but noble guard, which used to be entirely Swiss. No agreement has ever been made as to the actual relationship of the king- dom and the papacy, as the latter still refuses officially to recognise the former.* A good * The attitude of the Vatican to the war must in- evitably be influenced by the fact that complete victory for the Allies would deprive it of the spiritual allegiance of some millions of Eastern Christians who have been brought under papal control by Austrian policy in Galicia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, &c., but would without difficulty be brought back to the Orthodox Communion under Russian or Serbian rule. The passing of Turkish territory to powers belonging to the Eastern Church would also have a most prejudicial effect on the Roman ITALY 159 many Italians without any strong religious feelings have a certain sympathy for the Vatican as giving to countrymen of theirs so wide an influence in the world. Half-way between Italy and Africa in the sea, half-way between Italian and Arabic in speech, are the well-known Maltese Islands. Associated with Phoenician, Roman, St. Paul, Vandal, Goth, and Saracen, the archipelago passed to the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem in 1530. Under the Grand Master Valette they made a magnificent defence against the whole force of the Turkish Empire in 1565 ; next year the new capital was built, and it still bears his name. The islands became British as a result of the Napoleonic Wars. propaganda there. These considerations must from the papal standpoint far outweigh the sacrilegious destruc- tion of churches in France and Belgium, involving no loss of adherents. Many of the fabrics have long been the property of Government, though still used for religious purposes. CHAPTER IX TURKEY Once upon a time four hundred horsemen, riding through the hills of Asia Minor, sud- denly came upon a battle. With the nomad's love of fighting and the soldier's sympathy for the weaker side, they charged. They changed the fortunes of the day. Not till the victory was won did they find out that they had suc- coured their kinsmen, the Seljuk Turks, against their common Mongol foe. The place was Angora, the time the middle of the thirteenth century. These men were the ancestors of the present rulers of Constantinople. One would hardly expect such unsophisticated children of the wilds to make a great success of administering the dominions of Imperial Rome, especially TURKEY 161 since they had imbibed something of those eminently irritating quahties that frequently characterise relatively recent converts to a faith that has more than a touch of fanaticism. They did not govern the Eastern Empire very well. Indeed, about 1453, the year in which New Rome on the Bosphorus fell into their hands, their rule was not much better than that of the Christian States of Eastern Europe. But for a century or two after that time it t(;a5 on the whole a little better than that of the neighbouring Western States. Ranke (" History of Servia ") tells us a story that is characteristic of the reasons for the rapid success of the Turks. Hunyady (p. 117) had been asked what his religious poHcy would be if the people accepted his sway. He did not deny that he should compel them all to accept the faith of the Western Church. So the sultan was asked the same question. He rephed that he would build a church near ery mosque, and would leave the people at I 162 ARMS AND THE MAP liberty either to bow in the mosque, or to cross themselves in the church. Mahomet II., the conqueror of Constanti- nople, spoke fluent Greek, and was genuinely anxious to promote the welfare of his Christian subjects. Reahsing how the last emperor's submission to the pope was loathed by the citizens of the capital,* he restored the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, although in all the more important churches the muffled prayers of Islam supplanted the Christian hymn of praise. The fall of Constantinople was one of the most important events in all the history of man. Directly it changed the map of Europe, indirectly it revolutionised the map of the world. It consolidated the great conquests of Islam in Eastern Europe that made up for the great conquests of Christianity further * On hearing that the Emperor John Palseologus had conformed to Rome, Duke John Notaras exclaimed: " Better the turban of the Turk in Constantinople than the tiara of the pope." TURKEY 163 west. It seemed to mark the triumph of Asia over Europe, as she never had triumphed before. The first in time of Christian cities had become a new outpost of Islam ; the Eas- tern buttress of the Cross had become a main pillar of the Crescent. But many learned Greeks were driven to find new homes in countries further west. In Italy and other- where they rang the death-knell of mediaeval days and the new impulse of the Renaissance was hastened on. New interest in every side of life sent Europeans sailing over all the world and carried European arms into the furthest corners of the earth. Islam was outflanked, a European conquest of Asia began, and Europeans stretched new empires over the wide waste places of the globe. But if thus we are largely indebted to the Turk for the European Renaissance, it was (* idirect help that he gave. At the present me, despite a few vigorously Turcophile Titers such as Pierre Loti, the old idea is L 2 164 AEMS AND THE MAP very widely spread that the Turkish Empire in Europe has never stood for anything but barbarism. It is false. One corrective to such impressions is a visit to the mosques built by the conquerors in Constantinople, grand ornaments as they are to one of the fairest cities on the earth. That of Sultan Suleyman is in some respects an improve- ment on St. Sophia itself, from which it is obviously copied. Again, some preconceived ideas may be modified on reading Sir Paul Eycaut's description of Turkish campaigning in 1665 : " In the Turkish camp no brawls, quarrels, or clamours are heard ; no abuses are committed on the people by the march of the enemy ; all is bought and paid for with money as by travellers that are guests at an inn. There are no complaints of mothers about the rape of their virgin daughters, no violences or robberies offered to the inhabitants ; all which order tends to the success of their armies, and to the enlargement of their Empire." TUEKEY 165 This, a great contrast to the present war methods of cultured races, was naturally very highly appreciated during the seventeenth century. There is other witness to the toleration and good sense of Turkish Islam during its earHer years as a power in Europe — particularly the community of Spanish-speak- ing Jews who live at Salonica and elsewhere. Cross-persecuted guests of the Crescent. But this is httle relevant to the pohtics of the present day. On the whole, European Governments have been improving as the cen- turies rolled on — one could wish they had improved far more — the administration of the Turk, depending entirely, till but a year or two ago, on the personahty of the sultan, has been steadily growing worse till in truth the process cannot go very much further.* * Writing about 1837 Richard Cobden said of the disgraceful Chios massacre fifteen years before : *' Fire, sword, and the still more deadly passions of lust and fanaticism ravaged the island for three months. Of one hundred thousand inhabitants, not five thousand were 166 AEMS AND THE MAP Perhaps the Turk is an anachronism in the Europe of to-day. It is a flattering thought, for he alone of all the immigrants from Asia has refused to accept European civihsation. At least he will not have much more of it than brown boots and frock coats. So far at any rate it is not easy to be enthusiastic over the result of pouring fizzing pariiamentary alcohol into the cracked leathern bottles of Islam. Even Pierre Loti, that staunch admirer of the East, says that Islam is a glorious setting sun, destined perhaps to throw out great rays of hght before finally sinking beneath the horizon, but still ere long to take its place with the religions and the cultures of the past. It may be so. But on the day when the blind- folded muezzin no longer climbs the minaret to cry the adzan over the slumbering city, reminding men that there is no god but God and that prayer is better than sleep, the world left alive upon the island." Nor was this by any means the only massacre perpetrated by the Turks during the nineteenth century. TURKEY 167 will be far less picturesque and not one particle better. There is much to be said for the view that the Turks are but nomads, camped for a season in Europe. In the cities of Constan- tine and Hadrian they form the governing class and a large proportion of the people, but there is not, nor has there ever been, in Europe,* on any considerable scale, a com- pact mass of Turkish population forming the only residents of any considerable district. Asia Minor is the true home of the Turk. There was the chief cradle of his dominion ; there still is the real seat of his power.f The fact that since before the Balkan War the Moslem population of Europe has been reduced from about eight miUions to less than four is an earnest of what may be. ♦ At least beyond Thrace. t But althougli the Moslems of that land are generally- known as Turks, no human being can say how many of them really have much Seljuk or Ottoman blood. Even in Anatolia (which is practically identical with Asia Minor) Christians slightly outnumber the Moslems. 168 ARMS AND THE MAP At the height of Turkish power, when the sultan with some truth claimed to be " Master of Many Kingdoms, Euler of Three Continents and Lord of Two Seas," the Ottoman Crescent touched the Atlas Mountains and the waters of the Caspian, ruled burning Aden and frozen Azov, had the Soudan as neighbour far south and the kingdom of Poland to the north. The Black Sea was virtually an Ottoman lake, and in all the lands of Europe southward from Romania and Hungary the Crescent stood over the Cross, — save where the navy of Venice controlled the Dalmatian shore and the armed Serb nobles stood unconquered on the remote Black Mountain. Twice the victorious horse-tail banners of the nomads were seen from the walls of Vienna, when that city was the real centre of the Holy Roman Empire itself. It seemed just pos- sible that East and Western Rome might again have a common lord, more alien than any TURKEY 169 barbarian Emperor of old. Once * the great Sultan Suleyman in person led his forces to besiege the German seat of imperial power, and he announced that on a certain morning he would breakfast within the palaces of Vienna. Those were the days when the beastliness of war was partly hidden by the pleasantries of chivalry, and on the day appointed the Viennese sent out to bid the sultan haste in, else the breakfast might get cold. But untasted that breakfast remained, and the Turkish Crescent fared no better when after more than a century f it came to Vienna again (p. 94). To-day the European empire of the Ottoman House is cut down to less than half of Thrace with frontiers about twenty miles beyond Adrianople and Kirk Kihsseh.J Even far * In 1629. t In 1683. X Forty churches, but the " Kirk " means forty, the •* Kilisseh'* is derived from ecclesia. 170 AEMS AND THE MAP within these narrow bounds * the Crescent had been pushed but for the unseemly squabbles of the defenders of the Crojs. Even yet the rebuilding of Turkey is not beyond the bounds of what may come about, though the collapse of the Empire in Europe, perhaps in Asia as well, is by no means an impossible result of the war. The division of those most historic lands over which the Otto- man Crescent now stands would, however, be a work of the most extraordinary difficulty. If at last the Turk be driven from Europe,! the city on which, more than any other in the world, Nature and history and art have com- bined to impress the character of a great capital will almost certainly become a mere dependency of a foreign Power, the double * The proposed Turoo-Bulgarian frontier would have followed a line between the ports of Enos and Midia, thus leaving to Turkey little beyond the coast of the Sea of Marmora. t The continent would then be free from Asiatic rule for the first time at any rate since 711 (p. 209). TUEKEY 171 Btrait thrown open to all the shipping of the globe. Strange fate for Eastern Rome, the seat of empire for sixteen hundred years ! (p. 190). In Asia presumably an Arab khalif ate to hold the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina would be a political as well as a religious necessity. Otherwise it is unUkely that any new native Asiatic Power would be able to emerge. It would be worthy of the highest constructive statesmanship if Japan were to be given a share of the spoils (Yemen suggests itself as a possibiHty), for no serious student of history can doubt that the Island Empire with its huge power and comparatively restricted terri- tory must inevitably find some outlet. It is difficult to see where Japan could expand else- where without the possibility of coming into far more serious conflict with the ambitions of her present alhes.* * No fair-minded student of Japan's recent history- will accuse the Island Empire of any unduly aggressive 172 ARMS AND THE MAP That, if most of Turkey in Asia were parti- tioned among them, such Powers as Britain, France, and Russia would be able in their several ways to give administration far more acceptable to most of the people than that of the Ottomans need not be doubted. No thoughtful person, however, can contemplate without the gravest concern any further augmenting of the three empires which are already the largest upon earth from the stand- point of the future peace of mankind. Apart from the immense riches of the area, both in natural resources and in historical associations, its chief significance for Europe is in the religious importance of the Holy Land and in the certainty that a railway will one day spirit, but the position is there, a country which (even as recently enlarged by new possessions and spheres of influence) is too small to be at all likely permanently to satisfy the ambitions of its teeming and intelligent population. In this respect (only) Japan is the Germany of the Far East. As Japan has so long been famous for her tea, there would be some appropriateness in her gaining a country famed for its coffee. TURKEY 173 stretch through Asia Minor and Mesopotamia to the realms of Persia and India. This fact gives Britain a very close interest in the destiny of those lands that may be almost as remarkable for future riches and world impor- tance as they must always be for the unique associations of their immemorial past. The rulers of India have long shown particular concern with Koweit and other areas at the head of the Persian Gulf, the eastern gateway to Mesopotamia. All the great Christian States have naturally taken a deep interest in the land that was the cradle of their faith. Red-roofed German villages dot the Plain of Sharon and other districts ; the four chief Powers of Europe have conspicuous churches in Jerusalem and other towns. It is certainly undesirable that the country should be controlled by any nation closely associated either with the Greek or the Latin Church, whose rivalry at the Sepulchre of Christ is so exceedingly 174 ARMS AND THE MAP notorious. There is much to attract in the Zionist ideal of making Palestine a Jewish State once more, and many Jews have re- turned to the country that was once their own. It is altogether probable that such a State could hardly stand by itself. From a joint suzerainty of anything whatever heaven pre- serve us all : there must be a single protector. In many ways, from her own large and influential Jewish population, from the great interest that her people have shown in the matter, from her educational and missionary work in the area, and from her aloofness from all that would make the possession of Palestine by any European Power displeasing to the rest, America might be admirably adapted to the position. It is possible that such a scheme would appeal to the imagination of the Americans and that they would be willing to undertake the task.* It is, however, cer- * And it must be remembered that the United States generally keeps a naval squadron in the Mediterranean TURKEY 175 tainly more likely that they would refuse to take this further step away from the tra- ditional policy of non-intervention that was outlined in Washington's Farewell Address. At the same time it is undoubtedly the fact that America is in some respects more in- fluenced by sentiment than any other coun- try ; it is quite conceivable that to be the guardian of the Sepulchre of Christ, won from the Moslem world, should make a strong appeal to the national ambition.* That British rule in the Holy Land would be pleasing to a great many of its people is quite beyond the realm of doubt, nor is it unUkely that the protectors of Egypt would to protect her interests in those parts for which pre- sumably a coaling station would be an immense con- venience, bad as the harbours of Palestine are. * No doubt in course of time, under Jewish inspiration, a local Government might be called into being, but the difficulties would be very great and progress very slow. Any Legislature would be much torn by a babel of every religion, people, and language. Material development could hardly be left to any body of the kind. 176 ARMS AND THE MAP be glad enough to carry out the scheme of many great Pharaohs of old by extending the Empire of Misraim into the valley of Euphrates and Tigris. North-east of Asia Minor Turkey holds a large part of the ancient kingdom of Armenia, an unhappy State which, hke Poland, is divided among three empires.* The whole of it will almost certainly become Russian. The Armenians were the first people in the world to accept Christianity as a national faith, and their Church is entirely indepen- dent, holding Eutychian views : its supreme head is the CathoUcos, whose seat is the Convent of Etchmiadzin, near Mount Ararat, in Russian territory. The Armenians are scattered over all the East, and as far off as Singapore have a church dedicated to St. * Approximately there are two and a half million Armenians in the Turkish dominions (where disgrace- ful massacres have attracted widespread indignation) : rather less than half that number are under Russian control ; about 150,000 live in Persia. TUEKEY 177 Gregory the Illuminator, by whom their fathers were so largely converted during the fom'th century. Armenia has a great but a very pathetic history, and the land contains most important architectural monuments. The participation of Turkey in the war at once involved the loss of the nominal sovereignty of Egypt and Cyprus. The latter passed under the dominion, the former under the protection, of the British Empire. CHAPTEE X GKEECE As the people who invented European culture, the world's interest in the Greeks can never die. When St. Luke tells us * " all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear, some new thing," he outlines very accurately the spirit which Greece has passed on to the whole of the Western world. The word " politics " by which we still designate our pubKc affairs is a witness that our own democratic institutions had their cradle in the city-States of Greece. The culture that those city-States maintained hag never been surpassed. Nevertheless, such was the majesty inspired by the name of Eome * Acts xvii. 21. I I GEEECE 179 that Finlay tells us the Greeks had by the early nineteenth century forgotten the great deeds of their own ancestors, and had learned to pride themselves that they were the lawful inheritors of the great empire, and that their faith was supremely orthodox.* The fact that they were sprinkled long ago over almost the whole Mediterranean has greatly scattered the forces of the Greeks, and made them to-day a much less powerful nation than otherwise might be the case. Broadly speaking it may be said that these far-spread settlements of the Greeks have gradually become absorbed where they were surrounded by European populations, but that they have preserved their identity till to-day in lands here the /im^er Zand was occupied by Asiatics. f * Dr. MahafEy has done well to point out that (despite the lapse of centuries and much mixture of foreign blood) the general character of the Greeks to-day is identical with that of their ancestors in classic times. t But it might not be the easiest thing in the world t prove the descent of the vast bulk of the present ■■ 180 ARMS AND THE MAP It does not appear that, outside the limits of their recently enlarged kingdom and some of the iEgean Islands, the Greeks ever formed a compact population over any very consider- able area, comprising, that is, both the toilers in the fields and the citizens of the towns. On the contrary, their tendency was to occupy seaports with some restricted surrounding territory and to support themselves primarily by trade over the sea and with the people of the interior. In fact, the Greeks all over the Medi- terranean in ancient years were in a position more or less analogous to that of Europeans living in China to-day, except that in the Greek cities the population was more definitely Greek than it is European in any of the Treaty Ports. The poorer classes were Hel- lenes at least to a considerable extent. There was a strong consciousness of race. Wherever Greeks in Asia Minor and elsewhere from the Hellenes of classical days. I GREECE 181 a Greek city stood there was a portion of Hellas, that is, of the cultured Greek world as opposed to the barbarians without. But even where the whole population, country and town, was definitely Greek there was no single Government, far less was there any idea of an Empire of all the States of Hellas. One may discover, indeed, some feeble strivings after Greek unity in Amphictyonic councils, but they did not accompUsh much. To a considerable extent the Greek cities were all brought together by the semi-bar- barian Macedonian power under PhiHp and Alexander the Great. But although the Macedonians seem to have spoken a Greek ialect they can hardly be regarded as Greek -they were Grecian at most. Then the ^amping of all Macedonia by the deluge of llavdom has completely transformed the tnd : some districts recently acquired by the rreek kingdom to the north of the peninsula rf Chalcidice are very largely Bulgarian. 182 AEMS AND THE MAP Even the Byzantine Empire was by no means solely Greek. The renowned Emperor Justinian was of Slav race ; other sovereigns were Armenian, coming of the stock that first made Christianity the faith of a nation. And to the end the Empire retained a cosmopohtan character that in all the circumstances was extremely natural. Almost every Mediter- ranean race was represented in its mongrel population, save that none, or very few, was truly, what all liked to imagine was their origin, of the true breed of Eome. After all, the Empire was predominantly Greek, and most of its people used the tongue that iEschylus adorned. Of Roman origin httle more remained than a proud tradition and a great code of law. Chiefly on account of their own inexperience in such things, the Turks employed the Greeks to administer the Christian populations in Europe that had submitted to the Ottoman arms. This was done very largely through GEEECE 183 the Church, and the Greek officials became generally known as Phanariotes from the patriarchal quarter of Constantinople. The successor of Chrysostom was thus largely transformed into a sort of Minister of the Sultan for Native Affairs, no advantage to his spiritual power. It was extremely natural that the Greeks should seek to improve the occasion by attempting to Hellenise all whom they could thus influence. In fact, the whole race problem of the Balkans is greatly compli- cated — or simpUfied — by the fact that every nationality feels called upon to assimilate to •itself every community or individual over rhich or whom it can possibly get any con- irol. For the Greeks the work was un- ioubtedly made easier by the fact that they lave themselves absorbed a large amount of Slavic blood, and also by their great influence )ver the Orthodox Church, which is very idely known as Greek in every part of the 184 ARMS AND THE MAP world, though by far the greater number of its members are Slavs. The weary war of Greek Independence pro- duced no man of commanding ability, either statesman or soldier, among the countrymen of Aristides and Leonidas. But Byron helped them both with sword and pen, and he has managed to throw a halo of romance over the rather unheroic struggles of those by whose present he was in truth nearly as much repelled as he was attracted by their glorious past. A remark he made when watching an engagement, to the eflect that those Turks with their numerous guns might prove dangerous enemies if they happened to fire without taking aim, gives us one reason why the war ended as it did. It was, however, the Battle of Navarino in 1827 that really gave independence to Greece. The Turkish (and Egyptian) navy was battered to pieces by vessels of Great Britain, France GEEECE 185 and Kussia, not one of which was at war with the Porte. The awakened national feehng of the Greeks has taken the admirable form of notable attempts to restore the ancient glories of their race, but, from the impossibility of recalling the days of city-States, it is rather toward the Byzantine Empire, that ruled the whole Greek world from a single town, than to more ancient ages, that they strain their eyes to-day. It is distinctly unfortunate that they should have attempted to blot from their minds the memory of many centuries of their hfe. Mosque and minaret of the Turk, tower and castle of the Venetian, are ruthlessly torn down in a vain effort to forget that Greece ever knew a foreign lord. Most happily, however, this has not extended to the logical extreme of cutting down all the orange trees, that were originally brought in with Islam. As a result of the Balkan wars Greece gained a most important extension of her 186 AEMS AND THE MAP territory on the mainland. Her northern frontier was pushed back on the west to the vicinity of Corfu (which with the other Ionian Islands England handed over to her in 1864), and thence was fixed so as to give her Yanina and all the mountain lands up to the Belas- hitza range, with a further coast strip east- ward about fifty miles wide, including the whole of the Gulf of Kavalla. Kacially Greece has a good claim to the greater part of these lands, and especially to the famous triple peninsula of Chalcidice, with the great city of Thessalonica, or Salonica, at the top of the long gulf on its west. The whole sea- coast is predominantly Greek up to (and in fact far beyond) the new frontier of the king- dom, but in the north-east part of the added area there are a great many Bulgarians. The existing frontier is (perhaps naturally) ex- tremely unsatisfactory to the rulers of Sophia, but it is claimed by the Greeks that they could not possibly abandon any part of their present GREECE 187 territory on the mainland without leaving Salonica itself strategically at the mercy of the Bulgarians, while they further insist that the lands are by no means excessive in extent for accommodating the Greek refugees whom Bulgaria has expelled from the districts assigned to her.* Greece also secured by the wars the famous mountain island of Crete, whose people were so untruthful of old. The present Cretans were exceedingly anxious to be Greek, and in M. Venizelos they have given their mother an administrator of whom any land whatever might be proud. The islands of the northern * The Greek side of this very difficult problem is ably put in an article in the Nineteenth Century and After (February, 1915) by Professor Andr6ades, of the Univer- sity of Athens. He affirms that the harbour of Porto-Largo (which she already holds) is in every way better suited to the needs of Bulgaria than Kavalla (which she covets). He also sees a very real menace to the security both of Greece and Serbia were Bulgaria permitted to extend to Albania. He appears not to be at all anxious to see his country in possession of the Greek coast lands of Asia Minor, probably because they would perhaps be most troublesome to hold. 188 AEMS AND THE MAP ^gean, such as Thasos, Mitylene, Chios and Samos, so much told of in classic story, are already virtually secured to Greece, to whom racially they should unquestionably belong. The same (as far as race is concerned) may be said of the islands further south, Rhodes, famous for its Colossus and Patmos, where the Revelation was given to St. John,* which are still held by Italy as a result of her war for the Tripolitan sands. Of about eight miUion Greeks in the Near East more than half now live under their own flag. The rest are scattered over the Levant through all the seaports and islands from Constantinople to Alexandria.f The scheme * Italy occupies all the islands within the triangle Patmos, Rhodes and Kasos, Astropalia taken in on the west. The Italians are beginning to call the waters that lave them nostro pelago, but if they are permanently to retain this portion of Grecia irredenta it is not easy to see the force of their arguments about Italia irredenta. But of course Venice and Genoa at different times held large possessions in the Levant. t In his most interesting book " ^Egean Days " Professor Manatt, of Brown University, Rhode Island, GEEECE 189 with which the name of M. Venizelos is con- nected, that Greece should join the AUies against Turkey, receiving as her reward all the western section of Asia Minor, would about double her territory, place in her power the great bulk of the Hellas of old, make the iEgean very largely a Greek lake, and put under the dominion of Athens many thousands of now separated Greeks, particularly in '' Infidel Smyrna." * On the other hand, in the interior of her great new eastern province Greece would have to govern a very con- siderable aHen and perhaps hostile popula- tion, very largely consisting of Turks. For the distribution of the Greeks themselves beyond the recently enlarged kingdom still bears witness to the fact that the Hellenes of describes how at the Panegyris on Tenos " the Greeks of the captivity from all the East come to kiss the soil of Free Greece " and enjoy hearing the guns of the Greek warships more even than their national hymn. * The plan involves the handing over of the district of Kavalla to Bulgaria and receiving the Deiran Ghevghely area from Serbia. 190 ARMS AND THE MAP old were a maritime folk and spread them- ' selves exclusively by sea. On strictly racial and historical grounds Greece might make a good claim to the posses- sion of Constantinople itself. It was an Athe- nian colony, Byzantium, on whose foundations i Constantine raised the city that bears his name. And though always exceedingly cos- J mopolitan (as from its gateway site it could not fail to be), it was ever predominantly Greek ; and even to-day in the highways of the most polyglot town where Armenian and Turk, Arab and Negro, Slav and Kurd pass and repass with the leisurely tread of the East, it is truly the Greek population and the venerable Patriarchate that seem the abiding and permanent things.* * It would certainly make an appeal to the imagina- tion of the whole Christian world to see St. Sophia, after more than four and a half centuries of Moslem worship, restored to the (Ecumenical Patriarch. The total population of Constantinople is some 800,000, of which about 390,000 are Moslems, chiefly Tuiks, 150,000 are Greek, 140,000 Armenian. GEEECE 191 On the other hand, an ancient prophecy- foretells that Constantinople will one day be Eussian. If that were to come about, pos- sibly other strategic positions on the great waterway (such as the GallipoH Peninsula and the Sea of Marmora Islands) might be assigned by right of conquest or of purchase to other countries particularly interested in freedom of navigation, notably England, Eomania, and France. Part of the new territory of Greece com- prises the world-known peninsula of Mount Athos,* a monastic commonwealth ruled by a ♦ The eastern of the three long fingers of Chalcidice, the others being Longos and Cassandra. It has been sacred ground ever since classic days when a statue of Zeus looked over the sea from the top. The capital is Karyse, with a population of about 2,000. All are males, for, though large numbers of laymen are employed on the holy hill, no females of any kind are allowed, not even cows or hens — though in the case of insects and wild birds man cannot enforce the rule. Originally the community was wholly Greek, but Slavs have invaded of recent years. In 1875 the Kussians secured the ancient Convent of Panteleimon, the All- Merciful, now known as the Bosikon, in which with its sketes or cells 192 AEMS AND THE MAP council with deputies from the twenty-one convents, of which the oldest dates from the tenth century. Some monks were there before. By a timely submission to the sultan after the fall of Salonica in 1430 the monks preserved the important privileges that the emperors had conferred. These will not be affected by the transference to the kingdom of Greece. there are more monks than in all the seventeen Greek monasteries combined. The three other houses are respectively Komanian, Serbian, and Bulgarian. Some little trouble occurred about a year ago when certain of the monks declared that the Holy Name of God is itself divine. The heretical nature of this rather misty and elusive thesis appears, however, to have been satis- factorily proved by the despatch to the Holy Mountain of some Russian ships of war. CHAPTER XI SCANDINAVIA The magnificent Sagas of Jceland tell us how during the ninth century the three great mainland Scandinavian realms were con- solidated into the three kingdoms that we know ; Norway by Harald of the Pair Hair, Sweden by Eric of Upsala, Denmark by Gorm the Old. Some people approved of national union. Some did not. Some felt so very strongly against it that they sailed away to where the leaden northern seas splash over the grey- brown rocks of the Faroe Islands and Iceland. There they planted the communities in which the sagas were written during the very darkest ages of Europe. No earlier population existed in those far-off isles, save that a few Irish i 194 AEMS AND THE MAP monks (p. 61) had found their way to Iceland and discovered in that lonely land the solitude they craved. East of Scandinavia, in a land of myriad lakes, dwelt, and still dwell, remnants of the population of Europe that was there when the first Aryans came. The conquest of Fin- land was begun in the twelfth century by St. Eric, the giver of law^s. King of Sweden, ninth of that name, accompanied by the warrior Bishop of Upsala, St. Henry of England. The king was gentle and kindly ; he mourned the awful loss of hfe. The bishop was a sterner man who gloried in the extirpation of so many of the foes of God. And soon by the sword of a devout king and by the preaching of a warhke bishop, both saints, the Finns were persuaded of the excellence of Scandinavian culture and of the truth of the faith of the White Christ. Their country became a pro- vince of Sweden, which was in course of years assimilated with the rest of the land. But i SCANDINAVIA 195 by the strangest fate the Lapps, close cousins to the Finns, remain to this very hour a reHc of barbarism and a remnant of heathenism on European soil. Weird contrast between the high culture of the Norse town of Tromso and the untutored Lapps who dwell but a mile away in about the same con- dition as the Kafirs of Natal, — so far as tribes can be the same among the reindeer of the north and the buck of the African veldt. Thus the three Scandinavian realms were increased to five by the occupation of a remote island and by the conquest of a barbarian land. The five Norse nations were in the Union of Calmar (1397) brought together by good Queen Margaret of glorious fame, daughter of a King of Denmark,* widow of a monarch of Norway. The whole world is poorer that her Iod work has been undone. The infamous ♦ Waldemar IV. (Atterdag). 196 AEMS AND THE MAP Blood Bath of Stockholm drove Sweden into revolt in 1520. Norway was cleft from Denmark and spHced to Sweden at the close of Napoleon's wars, in 1814. That union endured nearly a century, but was rent in 1906. Finland has been taken by Eussia. Only Iceland and Denmark are joined. The outstanding fact in Scandinavian story is the growth of Swedish territory. During saga days the realm of Upsala was the least important of the three. By acquisition of Jamteland from Norway, and from Denmark of the wide, rich domain of Halland across the strait from Copenhagen, Sweden has far sur- passed her sisters both in population and in power. Norway is reduced to a mere coast- strip, except south-east ; Denmark is entirely excluded from the great peninsula pointing south. Both Jamteland and Halland have long been entirely Swedish, for the general character of Scandinavian culture is very SCANDINAVIA 197 uniform through the two peninsulas. Al- though the three kingdoms are very unneces- sarily jealous of each other, it is in many ways more hke the rivalry of different provinces or cities in the same country than ordinary international rancour. Each of the three feels that part of its terri- tory is lost. Norway still remembers that it was from her shores viking hordes sailed forth to people the Faroes and Iceland,* which yet are Danish now. Many Swedes still feel strongly about the lost province over the Gulf of Bothnia,t still more about the purely Swedish islands just outside the Fjord of Stockholm that are occupied by Russia to-day (p. 98). Muscovite interest in Finland was seriously roused when the great Peter built * To say nothing of Greenland, which had a Norse colony for about four centuries and is now again occupied by Denmark. t Though the close vicinity of Petrograd makes it extremely unlikely that Finland can ever be Swedish again. 198 ARMS AND THE MAP his city so near it. The duchy was con- quered from Sweden, a small part in 1721, the whole in 1809. As Grand Dukes of Fin- land successive Tsars have sworn to observe the ancient Uberties of the province, but this has not prevented most persistent though unsuccessful efforts to Eussify it in every possible way. Denmark herself is by no means consoled by the possession of far-away islands in the north for the loss of her own provinces of Schleswig and Holstein, with Lauenburg, taken from her by Germany in 1864-66. The Eider, which forms the division between them, was the border between the Christian Germans and the pagan Norse in the days of Charles when the great emperor founded Hamburg as a strong fort, well within the frontier, with which to lock the north. The two districts were united in 1386. They rebelled unsuc- cessfully against Danish rule in 1848-50. Holstein was always an integral part of the SCANDINAVIA 199 Empire, a German dependency of the Crown of Denmark. The two provinces had long had a sort of dual position, ruled by a prince of the Empire, the Duke of Holstein and Lauenburg, who was also the King of Denmark, a monarch independent in the north, but a vassal in the south, of his realms.* The population of Holstein is purely Ger- man ; the province touches Hamburg and Liibeck themselves. Through its soil is cut the famous canal from Kiel Harbour to the estuary of the Elbe. The northern part, at any rate, of Schleswig, with a population of about quarter of a million, is purely Danish, and most of the place-names throughout the province (as used in ordinary parlance) are hkewise Scandinavian, not German. The division between German and Danish speech * Though till after the days of the Emperor Frede- rick II. Denmark was herself on and off under imperial suzerainty. 200 ARMS AND THE MAP to-day is roughly a line from Flensburg south- west to Joldelund, thence north-west to Tondern and the North Sea. There appears to be no doubt that the great majority of the Danes at the present time are exceedingly anxious to recover all the land in which their countrymen dwell in the northern part of Schleswig, but that they do not desire the responsibility either of holding the canal or of ruling a population of Germans.* Denmark, Norway, Sweden, each in turn, have played a great part in the affairs of Europe. But not one alone has gained glory for a moment to compare With the glory of the whole race of Norse- There does not breathe a man in any Scandinavian realm, or in whose veins flows Northmen blood in any corner of the world, who will not stand for * So I gather from somewhat numerous Danish friends. If the allies be victorious the purchase -money for this Denmark irredenta might be found exceedingly useful for the rebuilding of the cities of Belgium. SCANDINAVIA 201 more when some far-seeing statesman has reared up anew immortal Margaret's shrine and bound together once again the sundered northern realms. CHAPTEE XII SWITZEELAND If France is a marvellous example of the welding of the compactest nation of Europe by sympathy and love, the Swiss Confedera- tion shows us how a true State can be evolved of alien elements drawn together by common ideals, combining against common danger, but still preserving their own diverse lan- guages and retaining a very wide local independence. The origin of the nation was the Ancient League of High Germany, dating from the thirteenth century, one of the somewhat numerous States and confederations into which Germany tended to divide since the Holy Eoman Empire denied to her the posi- tion of a national State. Partly by conquest, SWITZERLAND 203 but far more by voluntary joining of the league, a part of Italy and a large slice of Burgundy were added to the State. By the end of the fifteenth century it had become virtually independent of the Empire. At the time of the Revolution it fell under the influence of France, being reorganised as the Helvetic RepubUc without any federal system. In 1815, however, after sundry vicissitudes, the existing Swiss Confederation was estab- Hshed and the name of Switzerland became for the first time ofi&cially used. The last reUc of dependence on any outside Power was ended when in 1857 the King of Prussia renounced his rights over Neuchatel. It had revolted in 1848. Occupying the natural citadel of Europe, high up among the Alps, defended by the most efficient mountain troops on earth, inheriting great traditions from the past, Switzerland may perhaps be claimed as the only instance in Europe where complete failure of political 204 AEMS AND THE MAP frontiers to correspond to any racial division is accompanied by no problem whatever. No other country has any reason for coveting the smallest portion of Swiss soil, nor could the territory of the RepubKc receive any con- siderable extension without changing the whole character of the State. The neutraUty of the land would be a far greater anxiety did any main road pass through.* The absence of any Swiss border problem is the more remarkable when it is realised how exceedingly capricious and indented are the frontiers of the Republic. The famous city of Geneva, associated with Calvin and Rous- seau, entered the federation with its canton in 1815. It is almost surrounded by French territory, which near Gex and Pernay comes close to the west side of the lake and bends in * Though perhaps as few communications pass through Switzerland as could well be the case with an inland country whose territory touches that of four great military Powers, the temptation to violate her neutrality might, be great, especially were Italy involved in a war. SWITZERLAND 205 to include nearly the whole of its southern shore, besides comprising Mont Blanc with a large district of Alps. This area was part of Savoy. Thus one of the most important towns in Switzerland is joined to the great mass of the country merely by a narrow strip of lake shore. At each end of the Lepantine Alps Italy extends a long finger into Switzer- land, far beyond the Simplon Pass and right up to the Spliigen, while between them Swiss territory runs down to within a mile or so of the town of Como. This area, the Canton of Ticino, is purely ItaHan by race. In the beautiful Engadine district of the canton of Grisons a small community still speaks a Latin language called Eomansh, a relic from ancient days. There is a strong tendency, however, for this dialect to give way to German, which is the vernacular of con- siderably more than two-thirds of the nation. ReaHsing the inabiUty of a small State, without the opportunity of flying a flag on the k 206 AEMS AND THE MAP ocean, to protect her people in other lands, Switzerland most sensibly recognises the possibiHty of the same person having two nationahties at the same time. A Swiss may become a naturalised American and travel the earth under the protection of the Stars and Stripes, yet when at last he returns to his native mountain side he is no ahen, but still a citizen of the land in whose high air he first drew breath. The Swiss nation being largely artificial, not in fact including the whole of any race (unless of very small importance), has no sense of populations in captivity beyond its area, but the fact that its frontiers nowhere correspond very definitely with any racial or linguistic border makes the further extension of territory of the Eepubhc always quite possible. Though never more than a very secondary State, Switzerland has contrived to win the affection of her own people in a way that even the prestige of a great Power has by I SWITZERLAND 207 no means accomplished for the dominions of the Hapsburg House.* * It is interesting to notice in Swiss newspapers appeals to the different sections of the country to remember that their common Swiss patriotism must come far before the sympathies each may naturally feel for the belligerent that shares its language and traditions. It does not appear, however, that there is any real danger to the Republic from her French and German speaking parts being to some extent on different sides so far as their sympathies in the war are concerned. CHAPTEE XIII THE HISPANIAN PENINSULA What must have been the depth, length, breadth, and height of that edifice the Romans reared in Spain which neither two hundred and fifty years of barbarian Gothic rule, nor eight long centuries of Moslem power, could over- turn ? The outstanding fact in Spanish history is that the language (in a later form), the laws, the city life, and other characteristic institu- tions of Eome survived a thousand years of ahen rule and still occupy every corner of the peninsula, save where among the Pyrenees a small relic of the pre-Aryan population of Europe, the Basques, unsubdued, still main- tain their individuality, still speak their ancient tongue. But those whom even French- THE HISPANIAN PENINSULA 209 men cannot assimilate are not likely to be absorbed by Spain. The Roman conquest of the land began from the Punic Wars, when the Carthaginians, having founded New Carthage (or Cartagena) on the southern coast of Spain, made it a base for carrying their arms over a considerable part of the peninsula. It was during the fifth century of our era that the Visigoths first swept over the Pyrenees to set up a kingdom of their own on the ruins of the westernmost diocese of Rome. In 711 Tarik led over the narrow straits from Africa the vanguard of the Arab forces to build with wonderful rapidity a State whose place is important in the intellectual history of mankind. He landed on the rock that bears his name to-day — Jebel al Tarik, Gibraltar.* Modern Spain is the creation of the Moorish * It was known to the Greeks as Kalpe ; on the hillside, two or three hundred feet above the sea, is a massive oblong tower overgrown by plants and marked by shot, built by the Arabs not long after their first A.ll, o 210 ARMS AND THE MAP wars ; the first Mohammedan invaders had been Arabs, but the later arrivals were of Moorish race, and their name has stuck to all the Moslems that ever were in Spain. Anda- lusia — so Islam's Spanish realm was known, perhaps preserving the Vandal's name, — ^had never spread quite over all the north, and through the middle ages it was growing smaller year by year from risings that pulled down the Crescent and set up the Cross, first over one valley, then over the next. Among the principahties that thus rose up were Asturia and Cantabria (later Leon), along the Bay of Biscay's shore ; Navarre, on the border of France astride the western Pyrenees, and destined to a larger share of fame, Aragon on the lower vale of Ebro ; and the proud land called, from the castles the Christians built against the Moors, Castile. In 1469 Ferdinand, the King of Aragon, conquest and now known as the Torre de Omenaje. It is a picturesque old ^trpnghpl^ of rubble -stone and tiles like Roman bricks, THE HISPANIAN PENINSULA 211 married Isabel, the Queen of Castile, and before the end of the century they had together thrust out the Moslem from the whole land of Spain. A mighty power arose which for a season dominated Europe her- self ; and, as if the western continent were far too small for Spanish greatness to be adequately shown, Columbus discovered a New World which has made the Spanish tongue to be more widely spread than any other on the earth — except our own. Though shorn of the wide empire that was so largely the source of her glory, the Spanish kingdom still prospers, stretching far out into the ocean to include the Happy Islands of the West, not as a dependency, but as an integral part ; for the Canaries form a province of Spain. She is, however, deprived of the rock fort of Gibraltar, which has been British since 1704, when it was stormed by Enghsh and Dutch fighting side by side.* * Gibraltar remained permanently English, while o a 212 ARMS AND THE MAP Much has been done by common pride in common glory, but even to-day the welding of a compact nationality is by no means entirely complete. Difference of dialect in different provinces amounts almost to diver- sity of language. Popular ideals in diverse sections are very far from being the same. In the south there is much of the hazy atmo- sphere of dreams that Asiatics have imported into westernmost Europe,* in the north-east there is more of the restless hurry of modern Occidental life. But over all is the bright colour of the south. There have been mutter- Minorca, one of the Balearic Islands, was thrice lost to Britain but thrice gained back by Spain between 1708 and 1802. * It is surprising that this should to such an extent have been carried across the ocean. In the town of Cartagena, Colombia, founded in 1533, whose citizens still tell their children (and visitors) the exploits of Drake, most of the windows are closed by screens with turned rails, many project on short cornices. The houses frequently stand out over the side-walks on regular colonnades, usually circular pillars and round arches, the latter sometimes so high as to give a dis- tinctly Moorish effect. THE HISPANIAN PENINSULA 213 ings at times that Catalonia would rather look for her capital across the Pyrenees to the great and world-loved city of the Seine than to the town of Philip II.* on the highlands of the many-castled land. This, however, would give France an open border in place of the best natural frontier in Europe, and, although her abihty to assimilate the province can hardly be doubted,f such a transfer would probably do more to upset than to steady the general equilibrium of Europe. On the ocean coast of the peninsula in a district across the mouths of the great rivers of Spain another Christian Power had been gaining strength — a Power not united to Spain till in 1580 the area was seized by Philip II. By that time Portugal, inspired by * Madrid was an old Moorish town captured by the Christians in 1083 and made the capital of Spain by- Philip II. in 1560. t Till 1180 the Counts of Barcelona recognised the supremacy of the King of France. Many French who live near that border, including General Joffre, are fond of using the Catalan speech. 214 AEMS AND THE MAP renowned Prince Henry, surnamed the Navi- gator, had gained glories of her own not less dazzling than those of Spain. She was treated as a conquered country, and the union stank in the nostrils of every Portu- guese. By 1640 the river-mouth land re- gained her independence, and the most conspicuous monument in Lisbon to-day, a tall obelisk in the Pra^a dos Eestauradores, commemorates the end of the loathed cap- tivity of sixty years. Lisbon itself had been won by the Portu- guese from the Moors in 1147 with the help of some English crusaders on their way to the Holy Land. Gilbert of Hastings became bishop of the town, and ever since that day there has been a traditional friendship between England and Portugal. The country is too small very seriously to share the regional problems of Spain, though at times her north and south may not see eye to eye. The home-land politically includes those THE HISPANIAN PENINSULA 215 charming islands of lofty mountain, tumbling torrent, thick forest and very fertile valley which, occupied in the early fifteenth century when Gothic architecture was still in vogue, carry much of the picturesqueness of mediaeval Europe into the blue Atlantic wastes, Madeira and the Azores.* Each forms a province of Portugal herself. The peninsula is admirably provided by Nature with natural boundaries. Four great rivers flow westward to the Atlantic, and their basins are separated by well-defined mountain ridges which to a great extent formed the successive frontiers between the countries of the Crescent and the Cross. It was thus rather a perverse fate that decreed Portugal and Spain should divide the area in defiance of geography and * There has long been a large English colony in Funchal, Madeira. The interior of the island is most remarkable for the vastness of the mountain scenery in so small an area. The delightful little villages do much to recall the byways of mediaeval Europe, but there is just a suggestion of the New World. 216 ARMS AND THE MAP - draw their frontier right across all the natural boundaries. Portugal and Holland are admirable ex- amples of how what might have been a mere province was created a great nation and what might have been simply a dialect became one of the great languages of the world as a result of wide navigation. CHAPTER XIV THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE The great voyages that resulted from the Eenaissance and the colonies and dependen- cies in distant lands acquired had much to do with the building of European nations in the modern sense. Without their careers on the ocean Holland and Portugal would probably not be nations to-day. Italy and Germany might each by navigation have been united much sooner than they were. Neither England nor Spain would ever have acquired the posi- tion that they did had theii people remained at home. For the last four hundred years or so Europe has been engaged in extending her influence and her ideas to the utmost corners of the world. She has greatly transformed 218 AEMS AND THE MAP herself in the process. Dr. Johnson thought no one was the better for it. Only very slowly indeed has the Continent come to the conclusion he was wrong. Even after 1871 Bismarck himself rather rejoiced to see Prance occupied in African conquest, because he thought it would fritter away her strength and lower her striking force in Europe, while the acquisition of colonies would only weaken Germany. But very few still hold such views. All the nations of Europe are at one in wanting every inch of territory they can get. It has been a leading cause of the Great Mad War. To outline the story of a vast adventure would be out of place in a little work such as the present, but it may be useful briefly to inquire into the peculiar methods and ideals with which each country has addressed itself to the task.* * Likewise I prefer this method as it will enable me to set down nothing but from actual observation on the I THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE 219 England has expanded because the Govern- ment was too weak or too indifferent to pre- vent it, because the electric telegraph was, invented too late to permit Parliament to control its servants on the far side of the world. The great facts that stand out in surveying the evolution of the British Empire are the haphazard, unpremeditated manner in which it was all built up, and the way in which it was the work of private individuals, rather frowned upon than encouraged by the State. The colonies were in the main the result of discontent with conditions at home and the desire to establish something more satisfac- tory to the disgruntled in another portion of the world. Had the government of England spot. If the choice of places may seem capricious, the reason is unwillingness to write of lands or cities that I have not seen. The rather disproportionate space devoted to German dependencies is less owing to their intrinsic importance than to the interest naturally felt in them to-day and to the fact that not very much about them has been printed in English. 220 AEMS AND THE MAP been better, or at any rate more sympathetic they had never perhaps been founded. Admiral CoKgny planned Huguenot colonies abroad to spread the power of Prance and relieve animosities at home. The EngHsh carried out his ideas without having any plan whatever. The dependencies were the result of a desire for trade. No pioneers in the history of man ever had less idea of the structure to be raised on the foundations they were un- consciously laying down than those who first planted the flag over the distant factories of the East India Company. An account book, not a sword, was in their hands. All the Tudors and all the Stuarts, from the day when the seventh Henry rewarded Cabot for the discovery of North America with the poor tip of ten pounds, had the opportunity of enlarging their dominion by sea, but not one of them had the matter at heart. Wide areas have indeed been added THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE 221 to the all-red line as a result of European conflicts — India and Canada by the Seven Years War, South Africa and Trinidad as a result of the Napoleonic struggle. Great cities have been founded overseas by the British Government — Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1749 ; Sydney, New South Wales, in 1788. Still, on the whole, voluntary effort and private enterprise stand written over the British dominion as over no other since the world began. And, since the extremely unfortunate at- tempt to control the American colonies, the poKcy of the British has been to let things alone and take the line of least resistance, to govern all subject races not so much according to English as according to their own ideas. French Canada is as French as when under Bourbon rule ; Dutch South Africa as Dutch as when Holland's flag still floated over the Castle of Good Hope ; India as Indian to-day as in the reign of Aurangzeb. It suggests 222 AEMS AND THE MAP much serious thought that the only country in the world that England ever set herself dehberately to AngHcise was Ireland. Amazingly justified by results on the whole this want of policy has been.* There is less of a purely material nature to bind the British Empire than was ever the case with any dominion on the earth before, yet it may be doubted whether any well-devised scheme could possibly have worked so successfully. It is no small triumph that a few months after being in arms against it General Botha was ruhng South Africa under the British Crown, a year or two later fighting for it against a former colleague. The Empire over seas is a source of strength to the homeland in war no less than in peace. We British are not really better than anybody else, but, thank God, we think we are. * It is noteworthy that the French Canadians in 1776 and the Boers in 1914 refused to take advantage of excellent opportunities for revolting against British rule. THE EXPANSION OF EUEOPE 223 The greatest contrast with England in the circumstances and the manner of expansion is undoubtedly Russia.* Indeed, the fact that her colonial expansion has been by land and not by sea distinguishes her from every other European land. Instead of the wide- scattered, haphazard-won and ocean- washed realms of the British we see a great compact domain, Tsar-built and far inland. Russia's policy has always been Russification, facili- tated in Asia by the semi-Oriental character- istics of her own people. Wherever her flag is flying a process of assimilation is going on ; the language, laws, ideas and institutions of alien peoples are being Httle by little ground away to be replaced as opportunity may offer by the half- Asiatic culture of Muscovy. And east of the Urals this has much success. British government tends to be more just than sympathetic ; Russian administration is apt * Neither people cares to raise great buildings in the wilds ; in this, but little else, their methods are alike. 224 ARMS AND THE MAP to be sympathetic rather than just. Some thirty years ago the Hungarian professor, Arminius Vambery (Bamberger), who wan- dered through much of Asia disguised as a Mohammedan dervish, found considerable Muscovite sympathies among the Hindus, and their views were justified in some such words as these : " The Russians are more phant, they are less stiff in their intercourse ; their character, their system of government, and their ideas in general are more Asiatic than those of the English ; they are much nearer to us, and, if fate has decreed a foreign rule over us, we are likely to make better arrange- ments with them than with the English." * Much has happened since those words were writ ; few Indians probably would make use of them to-day. A Brahman is reported recently to have remarked that it had taken the Indians some centuries to teach England how to rule them, and they did not wish to * " The Coming Struggle for India." THE EXPANSION OP EUKOPE 225 have to begin giving such lessons all over again to another race. Still Russia undoubtedly is seriously settled in Asia to a far greater extent than any one of the maritime Powers can be. Her Eastern territory is a continuation of her own domain, her people are able to make their permanent homes there in a white man's realm — in a land like their own land, a land of wide flat steppes, a land flowing with great cold rivers, out of whose soil they may raise large crops. Over by far the greater part of the area they are brought in contact merely with a few nomad tribes with whom the moujik and the Cossack can fraternise and even intermarry without the least idea that they are losing caste, while the British being called to rule men highly cultured in the south of Asia must remain for ever almost entirely distinct. The Russification of northern Asia has on the whole been most successfully carried out. The general atmosphere of Vladivostock — the 226 AKMS AND THE MAP City of the Dominion of the East — ^is strangely similar to that of Peter's town. There is in both cities the same weird contrast (and com- bination too) of the manners of the East and West ; the same Tatar-Byzantine steeples rising above the flat lines of European homes ; the same long barracks and conspicuous forts with soldiers for ever in one's eye ; the same wide streets, well planned but rather meanly built ; the same contrast between good stores and small Asiatic bazaars ; the same race prominent in trade with its conspicuous Lutheran church. Much is heard of the necessity to Russia of possessing an ice-free port, but the truth is that the settled policy of the Empire is to expand wherever it can, in the direction of seaports or not. Some of the finest harbours in the world once bore the Russian flag, but Alaska was deliberately abandoned on the very sufl&cient ground that, to a country situated as Russia, oversea possessions must I THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE 227 be a source of weakness, not of power. A land whose people are not sailors has no real need of more seaports than she already holds to-day.* She is far safer without them. Wherever Russia comes down to the open sea there she gives hostages to fortune and invites disaster from which Nature intended her to be free. No European triumph can ever entirely restore to her the prestige that was lost at Port Arthur. And the more seas there are which her borders touch the more is her navy split up. A mighty Empire, the compactest in the world, has been built up by a stoHd, plodding race, all planned and all directed by the State. In some ways it appeals to the imagi- nation more than any other on the earth. It extends far into Central Europe ; it has a frontier with Japan ; it touches Norway ; * Complete freedom of navigation through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles in all conditions of peace and war is quite another thing. r 2 228 ARMS AND THE MAP it is but thirty-five miles from the soil of the United States. The keynote of French colonial expansion, "with its romantic daring and restless enter- prise, is well struck in the letter to the queen-regent by Champlain, the father of Canada : *' Of all the most useful and excel- lent arts, that of navigation has always seemed to me to occupy the foremost place. For the more hazardous it is and the more numerous the perils and losses by which it is attended, so much the more is it esteemed and exalted above all others, being wholly unsuited to the timid and irresolute. By this art we obtain knowledge of different countries, regions and realms. By it we attract and bring to our own land all kinds of riches, by it the idolatry of paganism is over- thrown and Christianity proclaimed through- out all the regions of the earth. This is the art which from my early age has won my love and induced me to expose myself all my life THE EXPANSION OP EUROPE 229 to the impetuous waves of the ocean and led me to explore the coasts of a part of America, especially of New Prance, where I have always desired to see the lily flourish." Romance and glory beckoned the Prench- man on and called him over the sea. The glamour of a world - encircling dominion appealed very strongly indeed to such a mind as his, and stirred him to action at once. The EngHshman, asked to find money for such schemes, was apt to sit unmoved at his desk, pen in hand, asking what rate of interest he would get and when it was likely that he would see it. The Prench, more than any other European people, were inspired by the love of empire for its own sake. They have never desired very strongly to have new homes across the sea, their trade in their own dependencies has never been very great, they have not been inspired to any very striking extent by religious zeal. Large schemes or small, any- 230 ARMS AND THE MAP thing that will add to the glories of Prance appeals more strongly than anything else. At Majunga during 1901 the present writer was told by a Frenchman palpitating with patriotic ardour how great that port would one day be. He pointed to a map showing the railway across Madagascar, of which Majunga was one of the terminuses. On being asked the way to the station and also questioned as to sundry other points, he admitted successively that the railway was not finished, in fact the track was not actually begun, nor was the country as yet surveyed, nor even very effectively pacified ! While the Enghsh colonists in America were contentedly tilling the rather sterile soil between the Appalachians and the ocean, the French had wandered far inland to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. They had planned a great series of settlements on the inland plains with communications along the THE EXPANSION OP EUROPE 231 Mississippi and the St. Lawrence.* And this is the more remarkable since, while the EngHsh colonists frankly adapted themselves to the conditions of a new land, the French had insisted on settling a feudal nation on the frozen banks of the St. Lawrence, a project so successfully achieyed that even to this hour the many cassocked priests and vested nuns of French Canada create an atmosphere more mediaeval in some points than anything in republican France. The mighty scheme of a European empire of Lidia also was conceived by Dupleix's brain in days when the French were persuading the Hindus that they were courteous gentlemen, the EngHsh low-born peddlers. * While standing by the Citadel of Quebec or musing among the ruins of Louisbourg or Beau S6jour (Cumber- land, near Amherst, Nova Scotia) or Ticonderoga, contrasting their massive ramparts with the poor defences of such English strongholds as Fort Edward (Windsor, Nova Scotia) or Fort Pitt (at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), it is impossible not to feel how much more seriously the military part of it all was taken by the French than by their rivals. 232 ARMS AND THE MAP Nor were the French at all seriously daunted when driven from the original seats of their foreign power. For the failure of India they found compensation in Cochin- China ; in Canada a French community was lost, but another was created in Algeria. And that French love of great enterprises has not died in later days is shown by the Suez Canal achieved, the Panama Canal begun. The success of Columbus's first voyage caused Spain to pass from mocking incredulity to enthusiastic admiration. Beyond the ocean were new lands to be possessed, new races to be gathered to the Empire of the Cross, riches untold to be gained. Highest nobles, meanest beggars, joined in the new crusade and began that westward move of population destined to change the face of the world. The Spaniard was primarily a crusader and secondly a gatherer of gold. The whole history of his country for eight centuries had THE EXPANSION OP EUROPE 233 been one almost ceaseless warfare for the faith. Now the same conflict was to be renewed in a distant land, against other enemies of God and Spain. His love of gold, which he knew not how to use — for he had a deep contempt for trade — characterised the Spaniard in his first colonial days even more than his missionary zeal. An Indian chief in Cuba* made his people worship a lump of gold to conciliate the white man's god. But the Spaniard was also emphatically a lover of town life, a builder of cities and of shrines. His great forts and churches stand to-day in ruin or in use. A vivid idea of his former power is conveyed by a visit to Old Panama, a town forsaken — save for a few negro shacks — since it was burned by bucca- neers under Enghsh Morgan in 1671. f It is * Named Hatuey. Burned alive afterwards by the Europeans, he refused to become a Christian, for if, as they assured him, heaven were full of Spaniards, he preferred to go elsewhere. t The existing city of Panama was founded in 1673 ; 234 AEMS AND THE MAP the oldest of all European settlements by the blue waters of the Pacific, and the fresh green of the luxuriant tropical growth sets off to great advantage the grey old walls. A great stone tower, in whose masonry thrive many plants, rises high above the trees beside the lonely ocean shore, looking over the choppy waves for the Peruvian treasure-ships that will never come again. The manner in which this high steeple served both for the hanging of church bells and as a sentry's post is characteristically Spanish. And as one wanders through the damp forests by the sandy beach one sees the spKt arches and walls of tall churches in ruin, and fragments of the city defences still stand along the shore. And in the low cKffs by the tiny harbour there are caves where perhaps the treasure was stored. Very similar to the methods of the four miles away, by the mouth of the Kio Grande, at the Pacific entrance to the canal. THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE 235 Spaniards were those of their neighbours, the Portuguese, a people who, considering the smallness of their country, played a part in the world surpassed only by the achieve- ments of the Dutch. They had some advan- tage in that their empire was almost a con- tinuation of their home-land, beginning in Morocco, only just over the Straits of Gibraltar. This, however, in truth made comparatively little difference as communica- tions were entirely by sea. The Portuguese was even more a great builder than the Spaniard, rather of castles than of churches. The amazingly substantial nature of his masonry at such places as Mazagan on the coast of Morocco, and on the island of Mozambique off the east coast of Africa,* is a most striking proof of the deadly earnest of the Lusitanian pioneers. * At both places the massive walls of the sixteenth century are actually washed by the waves ; at Mazagan, at any rate, the full force of the Atlantic dashes in with 236 ARMS AND THE MAP In the great lone forests of Brazil Portugal has played much the same part as has Spain in the same hemisphere. Elsewhere her influence has been far less lasting, because her empire consisted merely of dependencies where a few officials ruled large populations of other race, instead of colonies where great numbers of Europeans could with local diversity reproduce the conditions of their home-lands. On the scattered tribes of American Indians, beginning to grow into nationhood only here and there, Spain made an impression that will probably last to the end of time : on the great and cultured tremendous force, but not a stone has been dislodged. The tall watch-tower now forms the minaret of the principal mosque, pointed battlements and domed turret being added by the Moors. The castle of S. Sebastiao at Mozambique, built by Albuquerque in 1508, is still in the possession of his countrymen. It consists chiefly of a hugely thick curtain wall erected on the reefs of coral enclosing a large court. Very striking is the contrast between the massive solidity of these vast works and the rough sort of shanties that are good enough for a new colony of Britain. THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE 237 nations of the East Portugal could leave no more lasting mark than does a stone cast into a pond. The expansion of Holland was purely com- mercial, and both for capital and men the Republic was able to draw to some extent on the German States inland. In addition to trade the Dutch contrived with great success to build up a sea power of their own.* * Had they succeeded, the German efforts at expan- sion in the eighteenth century would have followed the same general lines. The Emperor Charles VI. incorporated the Ostend Company in 1722 with the express object of fostering German sea power. Its agents were largely British ; it had to be sacrificed to the jealousy of the maritime Powers and was bankrupt in 1784, but its success was much greater than might be thought from the biting satire of Carlyle : *' The Kaiser's Imperial Ostend East India Company, which convulsed the diplomatic mind for seven years to come, and made Europe lurch from side to side in a terrific manner, proved a mere paper company ; never sent ships, only produced diplomacies and *had the honour to be.'" Frederick the Great tried to get a share of Indian trade for Prussia by giving patronage to the Asiatic Trading Company of Emden, dating from 1750, and by founding three years later the Bengalische Handelsgesellschaft. Neither had any permanent success, chiefly from the 238 AEMS AND THE MAP They showed a wonderful knack of occupy- ing ports well placed for trade. At New Amsterdam they claimed with some reason that they held the oyster ; the British settle- ments north and south were merely the two shells. They were indeed of less commercial importance than New York * with its splendid gateway to the interior, but the shells shut down on the oyster ! Cape Town, intended merely as a cabbage- garden for East Indiamen passing to and fro, whose crews were apt to suffer from scurvy, has become the capital of a new empire, grandly placed between the beetling crags of Table Mountain — fair silver-trees covering its lower slopes — and the white-blue waters of the bay. Holland was a small country opposition of the British East India Company. The flag of Brandenburg (or Prussia) was hoisted over several trading stations on the Gulf of Guinea, but here too was hauled down by the maritime Powers. * The place was thus renamed when it became British in 1664, after the Duke of York, afterwards James II. THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE 239 and so prosperous that there was much difficulty in inducing her people to make new homes abroad. So settlers were invited from all the world, and thus Dutch-founded cities are apt to be extremely cosmopoHtan in race. Within a year or two of its founda- tion twelve languages were heard in the streets of New Amsterdam. The denizens of Cape Town are in some respects yet more varied in their breed than are those of New York herself, for Malays from Java had to be brought to do much of the less skilled work. Their quarter of the city to-day is marked by little minarets of mosques far overtopped by the steeples of churches hard by. The East Indian archipelago is the chief part of her colonial empire that still lies under Holland's flag, and it yet retains the mark of its foundation in that it yields a substantial revenue to the mother-land.* * America in her dependencies has invariably shown a strong desire to spread her own republican institutions 240 AEMS AND THE MAP The expansion of all the lands that had acquired nationhood during Eenaissance days followed a more or less natural law ; depen- dencies were rather forced upon them in the first place than deliberately sought. Strik- ingly different has been the case with the much-discussed acquisitions of Germany : written large across them all is the fact that the whole movement for expansion obviously centres in Berlin.* The Germans, like their among whatever races recognise her sway. In the Canal Zone she has given an example of efficiency that is as interesting to the social reformer as to the statesman or the engineer. The preservation of the Kepublic of Panama, with its capital encircled by American territory and administered by American sanitary officials, is an extremely interesting study. Sweden's colony on the Delaware (1638) is still com- memorated by the old Scandinavian churches that are now joined to the Anglican Communion. I have not visited any of the modern dependencies of Italy or the Danish West Indies. The former have been acquired very much in the same way as the German possessions. * But it was (as Holland Kose points out in " The Origins of the War ") to a large extent the mercantile community in Germany that first urged Bismarck to undertake a colonial policy, which he did in 1884. THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE 241 cousins in Holland, are by nature a race of traffickers, and by their skill in learning foreign tongues, by the great pains they ever take to study the wishes of their customers, they have built up a world-wide trade. What may be its fate as a result of the Great Mad War is within the knowledge of God. Formerly British and Germans were on the friendKest terms ; partly by German help the British Treaty Ports were developed. Some- times the islanders complained that the Teutons paid far too little attention to the most important things of life, such as morning baths and races and ponies and games, but there was nothing like serious friction till from Potsdam came out the order that the Kaiser's men must live in settlements under the Ger- man flag. This was while the present writer dwelt on the coast of China (1897-99) in Tientsin, a port whose British Municipal Chairman was long an honoured German, Detring by name. 242 ARMS AND THE MAP The Germans were satisfied enough with the British concession, where sundry trees had been induced to grow in the ungrateful alkah soil, and the two towers of the Gordon Hall by the gardens gave some atmosphere of home. They long refused to move into the new con- cession of their Fatherland, and for more than a year its open wastes might be surveyed in vain for a single house in European style. Gradually the desired separation came about, promoted largely by the seizure of Kiao Chou with the the little port of Ts*ingtao, which soon became a purely German town. And up and down the Chinese shore Teutons hved in settlements of their own. This had never come about if they all had been left alone. Though only held on a lease of ninety-nine years (from 1897), Ts'ingtao is (or rather was) perhaps the most valuable of all the posses- sions of Germany overseas.* Its possibilities * The area of the leased territory is 117 square miles, and there are valuable concessions and privileges in the THE EXPANSION OP EUROPE 243 for trade are great, with a very fair harbour and the new railway running into the interior over the very fertile plains of Confucius' own province of Shantung, through its beautiful capital, Chinan-fu, sometimes called by Europeans the Paris of China. Other German possessions in the Pacific are the north-east portion of Papua, or New Guinea, called Kaiser Wilhelm's Land, and islands off its shore extending seawards many hundred miles. The dust of various British men of letters is mingled with un-EngUsh soil, and in a German island of Samoa rests Robert Louis Stevenson.* interior. In a Scots work on *' China " by Hugh Murray and five others, published in 1836, the bay is described as the chief port of the province with a spacious harbour. All this will pass to Japan. * Upolu. Sawaii is also German ; Tutuila, with its port of Pango-Pango, is American. Other Grerman islands in those parts are Pelew, Marshall, Ladrone or Marianne, Bismarck and Caroline Archipelagoes ; also the northern part of the Solomon Islands. It is remarkable that (despite their comparative 08 244 ARMS AND THE MAP Pour large patches of African soil are in German maps painted red. The only one outside the tropics is South-west Africa, a largely desert land adjoining the Union of South Africa in the barren region of the Kala- hari. It is the oldest of recent German colonies in Africa (p. 238, note), dating from 1883, when the Portuguese-named Angra Pequena was re-christened Liideritzbucht from a citizen of Bremen, who did much to promote the expansion of his country into the dark continent. insignificance) Germany is more interested in her colonies than any other Power. Their positions are clearly and attractively set out upon large maps of the world in the chief railway stations of the Empire. At the time of writing most of these German possessions have been conquered by the British or the Japanese, but of course they remain German soil unless formally ceded by a treaty Few thoughtful persons desire to see the wide-flung frontiers of Britain pushed still further out, but it would be virtually impossible in these days to repeat the mistake of Louisbourg in 1745 by restoring what the dominions have won, and it is inevitable that provision should, if possible, be made for an all-British railway from Cairo to Cape Town (p. 249). THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE 245 More important than either Togoland or the Cameroons is German Bast Africa, with its fine capital of Dar-es-Salaam, the Port of Greeting. This Kaiser-builded town rises white against the sky in the midst of its dense vegetation. One of the finest cities of Africa seems to greet the voyager on the deck of a Hner that has steamed into the magnificent land-locked little harbour, a beautiful sheet of water at the mouth of the Mssimbasi River, enclosed by masses of coral rock with waving palms growing in the red clay that overlies it. A most gorgeous array is formed by the Government buildings that rise above the mango trees or extend along the water front, while the two great churches, Evangelical and Roman Catholic, lift their spires above every- thing else ; but no private structures are to be seen. This is not a merchants' town, although the custom house with its towers and spires is a most impressive thing, a struc- 246 AEMS AND THE MAP ture almost as large as Buckingham Palace, though generally so devoid of contents that it is a common English remark on the coast that the imports of the colony are German beer and the exports empty bottles. This epigram is greatly exaggerated, like most pleasantries of the kind — for trade is really extending — but it is not entirely destitute of truth. The atmosphere of artificiality is beyond question extremely marked. The broad plan of the town itself and its numerous white- uniformed officials are so clearly '' made in Germany " and exported to the African forests. So little real impression has been made by the Teutonic settlement that one constantly hears the German officials speaking to the Kaiser's black subjects in Enghsh as the only common language they possess. As soon as one has passed through the thin line of German culture that extends along the shore one reaches the Arab and Swahili town, THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE 247 where things are much the same as before the Europeans came, except that the streets have been straightened and widened and galvanised iron has replaced the immemorial thatch. In spite of all, the real beauty of the foliaged town grows very much as one paces its broad, straight, shady streets. The Unter den Akazien, whose trees almost meet overhead, is one of the loveUest thoroughfares in any African town, and the general monumental appearance of the place is emphasised by the statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I. in the public gardens by the sea. Englishmen may smile at the lessons German children learn about the foreign possessions of their Empire, but Dar-es-Salaam seems to possess the atmo- sphere of a real capital to a far greater extent than any British colonial town of no greater intrinsic importance. A railway to Lake Tanganyika was completed in 1914. Tanga, a seaport further north near the frontier of the same colony, is more beautiful 248 AKMS AND THE MAP in some respects than Dar-es-Salaam. It is another forest city with abundant vegetation of the freshest green, contrasting admirably with the deep blue of the sea ; the mist- wrapped mountains of the interior tower above everything else, while the verandahed houses seem to be built amid the vegetation of a vast botanic garden on the bluff above the smooth harbour. The chief object of interest on the shore is the older railway that winds up to the slopes of Kilima Njaro and is planned to reach the Victoria Nyanza, paralleling the British line from Mombasa to Uganda. A person accus- tomed to the rough new tracks in a young British colony may well be quite taken aback by its appearance, which indeed would com- pare favourably with that of many main lines of Europe. Stout metals are fastened by means of chairs to iron sleepers, and the ballast of oolitic limestone is so neatly broken into blocks of uniform size that it is difficult THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE 249 to find a little fragment if one wants a sample of the stone. The Arnjung locomotives, with their German eagles and their pairs of little wheels for chmbing hills, are far more spick and span than the engines that carry the crowds into London and out again each day. The western frontier of this dependency in- cludes the old Arab lake-port of Ujiji (chiefly known for its associations with Livingstone), and looks across Tanganyika to Belgian Kongo, while touching both Central and East British Africa.* Of course, the great weakness of the German dependencies is that no Germans are living in them, only some twenty-three thousand in all. To a certain extent the reason is that there are so many officials as to leave little * Thus, if its western strip were acquired by Britain, the Cape to Cairo Railway would not need to touch foreign soil. But probably for some time communication would be maintained by a steamer on the lake. (The railway has, however, already been taken from the Victoria Falls into Belgian Kongo, thus beginning to follow an alternative route.) 250 ARMS AND THE MAP room for others, but modern Germany has had no opportunity of colonising under her own flag in any white man's country, except perhaps on the smallest scale in some of the islands of the Pacific. That Germans can be superb colonists no one will doubt who has visited either their eighteenth-century settle- ments in Pennsylvania and Lunenburg, Nova Scotia or their more recently planted com- munities in the Middle West. It was one of Bismarck's sayings that England has colonies and colonists, France colonies but no colonists, Germany colonists alone. Had this only been realised before 1871, had Algeria then been taken instead of the district of Metz, the Germans would have had the opportunity, which at present is denied them, of colonising under their own flag, on a vast scale, and in a portion of the world really suited to be the permanent home of men of Northern race. There might have been evolved a magnificent dominion, a place THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE 251 in the sun indeed that would have realised the ambition of Potsdam ! In the true sense there are no German colonies to-day. About the dependencies of the Empire one notices a methodical thorough- ness in development that no European nation ever brought to the task before, but the whole atmosphere seems so artificial that an EngUsh visitor is almost apt to feel they should be occupied rather by machines than by men. And now, in bidding his readers farewell, the author wishes, if he has written a single word unsympathetic to any nationality what- ever, unhesitatingly and unreservedly to with- draw it. a CO \--: i INDEX Aachen (Aix la Ghapelle), 15, 17—18, 58, 129 Aberdeen, 15 Aden, 168 Adige, River, 155 Adrianople, 112, 167 Adriatic, 120, 132, 155, 157 iEgean Islands, 180, 188 Africa, 209, 244—249 Agram (Croatia), 138 Aland Islands (Sweden), 98 Alaska, 156, 226 Albania, Albanians, 112, 116, 120—124, 156 Albuquerque (Portuguese), 237 Alexander the Great, 181 Algeria, 232, 250 Alps, 148, 152, 203—205 Alsace-Lorraine, 20, 27—29, 36—37 America, 21, 27, 136, 174, 228, 239—240 Amsterdam, 52 Amur, River, 85 Anatolia. See Asia Minor. Andalusia, 210 Andorra (Pyrenees), 157 Andr^ades, Prof., 187 Angora, Battle of, 160 Antivari (Montenegro), 119 Antwerp, 47, 52, 53 Appalachians, Mountains, 230 Aquileia, 131, 155 Arabs, 171, 209, 246 Aragon, 210 Ardennes, 53 Armenia, 176 — 177 Amdt, German poet, 20 • Arras, 45 Artois, 48 Aryan race, cradle of, 97 Asia Minor, 160, 167, 173 Asturia (Spain), 210 Athens, 187 Athos, Holy Mountain, 115, 191 Atlas Mountains, 168 AttUa, 136 Aurelian, 103 Austria, 21, 22, 23, 91, 119, 126 —147, 152 Azores, 215 Azov, 168 Baikal, Lake, 85 Balkans, 102—124 Baltic, 129 Barbarossa, Holy Roman Em- peror, 20, 115 254 INDEX Basques, 43, 98, 208 Bavaria, 24, 26, 130, 151 Belfort, 27, 37 Belgium, 44 — 58 Berlin, 21, 26 Bessarabia, 93, 106 Biscay, Bay of, 210 Bismarck, 22, 27, 28, 141, 218, 250 Black Sea, 106, 168 Blanc, Mt., 205 Bohemia, 16, 125, 127, 129, 131, 132, 143 Bosnia, Bosnians, 116, 118 — 119, 131, 135, 142 Botha, General, 222 Bourdon (French writer), 22 Boyne, River, 59, 65 Brabant, 46, 48 Brandenburg, 16, 23 BrazU, 237 Bremen, 96, 244 British Isles. 47, 59—82 Brittany, Bretons, 43, 76 Bruges, 46 Brussels, 48, 52 Bukovma, 91, 106, 139, 142 Bulgaria, 103, 108—114, 181, 186, 189 Burgundy, 48 Byron, 184 Oabot, 220 Caledonians, 70 Calmar, Union of, Cameroons, 245 Canada, 221, 231 Canaries, 211 195 Cape Town, 238 Carmthia, 130, 135 Carlyle, 237 Camiola, 131, 135, 143 Carpathians, 103, 106, 127, 139 Cartagena, Colombia, 212 Carthage, 209 Casimiu the Great (Poland), 133 Caspian, 168 Castile, 210 Catalonia, 213 Cattaro, 119, 157 Caucasus, 86 Chalcidice, 186, 191 Champlain, 228 Channel Islands, 41 Channel Tunnel, 82 Charles the Great (Charle- magne), 11, 61, 153 Charles V., 48 Charles VI., 237 Cherbourg, 39 China, Chmese, 85, 86 Chios, 165, 188 Cleves, 54 Cobden, 165 Cochin China, 232 Coligny, Admiral, 220 Columbus, 211, 232 Como, 205 Constantine the Great, 121 Constantinople, 109, 145, 160 seq., 171, 190 Copenhagen, 196 Corfu (Corcyra), 120, 186 Corinth, 120 Cormac mac Art, 59 Corsica, 153 Cossacks, 92 93, 225 INDEX 255 Courland, 96 Cracow, 132 Crete, 187 Crimea, 93, 106 Croatia, 135, 138, 142 Crusades, 33 Cuba, 233 Cyprus, 177 Czech, 136 Dacians, 103—104 Dalmatia, 135, 138, 142, 156, 168 Dalriada (Irish colony in Scot- land), 72 Dante, 12—14 Danube, River, 103, 130 Dardanelles, 111 Dar-es-Salaam, 245 Delaware, 240 Denmark, 23, 26, 193—200 Diocletian, 121 Dniester, River, 103 Dobrudja, 106 Donalitius (Lithuanian poet), 97 Drake, 78 Dual Monarchy, origin of, 125 Dubbn, 64 Dunes, Battle of, 37 Dunkirk, 37 Dupleix, 231 Durazzo, 120 Durham, Edith, 124 Dusan, Stephen, 115 East Indies, 57 Edinburgh, 73 Egypt, 175, 177 Elbe, River, 31, 132 Electors of the Holy Roman Empire, 16 Emania (Ireland), 69 Emden, 237 Engadine, 205 England, English, 19, 75—81 214, 219—222, 241 Enos, 170 Erz Mountains, 131 Esthonia, 96 Etchmiadzm (Armenia), 176 Exarchate (Bulgarian), 113 Exeter, 76 Faroe Islands, 193, 197 Ferdinand of Aragon, 210 Ferdinand, Archduke, 125, 140 Ferdinand, Tsar of Bulgaria, 111 Femay, 204 Finland, Finns, 96, 98, 194— 198 Finlay, 179 Flanders, Flemish, 37, 45, 48 Florence, 12 France, French, 20, 25, 29, 33 —43, 203, 228—232 Francis Ferdinand assassinated, 142 Francis II., last of the Holy Roman Emperors, 141 Francis Joseph, 138 Frankfort-on-Main, 129 Frederick the Great, 237 Freeman, Prof., 127 256 INDEX Galicia, 91, 127, 131, 142 Gallipoli Peninsula, 191 Garibaldi, 38, 151 Geneva, 204 Genoa, 153, 188 German " Colonies," 243—244 Germany, Germans, 11 — 32, 36, 44, 75, 96, 107, 130—131, 148—149, 202, 240—251 Gex, 204 Gibraltar, 209, 211 Giraldus Cambrensis, 63 Glendalough, 60 Goga (Romanian poet), 140 Gothic architecture, 33 Goths, 36, 209 Greece, Greeks, 104, 108, 112, 121, 178—192 Greenland, 197 Grisons, 205 Grotius, 51 Guinea, 238 Hague, The, 50 Halich (Eastern Galicia), 133 Halifax, Nova Scotia, 221 HaUand (Sweden), 196 Hamburg, 199 Hanover, 81 Hanseatic League, 17, 47 Hapsburg House, 23, 51, 126 seq.y 129, 207 Harald of the Fair Hair, viii, 193 Harte, Prof., 114 Helgoland (HeHgoland), 31—32 Henry, Prince, 214 Henry, St., 194 Herodotus, 104 Herzegovma, 118—119, 131, 135, 142 Hohenstaufens, 17 Hohenzollerns, 23 HoUand, 44—58, 81, 97, 237— 239 Holstein, 23, 198—200 Hungary, 90—91, 125, 127, 131, 142 Huns, 136 Hunyady, 117, 161 Huss, John, 136 Iceland, 97, 193, 196 niyrians, 121 India, 221, 224, 231 Ireland, 59—70, 78, 222 Isabel of Castile, 211 Islam, 84, 102, 110, 122, 162, 166, 210 Istria, 155 Italy, Italians, 17, 38, 47, 105, 128, 132, 148—159, 188, 240 Ivan the Terrible, 91 Jamteland (Sweden), 196 Japan, 86, 171, 227, 243 Java, 239 Jerusalem, 173 Jews, 93, 107, 111, 174 Joffre, General, 213 Julian, Emperor, 35 Justinian, 182 Kaiser Wilhelm's Land, 243 Kalahari. 244 INDEX 257 Kalpe, 209 Kara George, 118 Kary© (Mt. Athos), 191 Kavalla, 186—187, 189 Kiao Chou, 242 Kiel, 199 Kilima Njaro, 248 Kingston, W. B., 141 Kirk Kilisseh, 169 Kishineflf, 106 Knight, E. F., 122 Kollar (Slovak poet), 89 Kongo, 57, 249 Kbnigsberg, 129 Kossovo, 116 Kossuth, Louis, 138 Koweit, 173 Krim Tatars, 93, 99 Labouchere, H., 31 Lapland, Lapps, 99, 195 Lauenburg (Denmark), 198 — 199 Lemberg (Lvoff), 133 Lepantine Alps, 205 Letts, 96 Leyden, 49 Liege, 45 LHle, 37 Lisbon, 214 List (German economist), 21 —22 Lithuania, Lithuanians, 23, 95 —97 Livingstone, 249 Livonia, 96 Lombardy, Lombards, 149 — 150 London, 79 Loti, Pierre, 163, 166 Louis XIV., 36 Louisbourg, 231, 244 Louvain, 46 Lubeck, 199 Lucaci, Romanian doctor, 140 Liideritzbucht, 244 Lutetia (Paris), 35 Luxemburg, 21, 31, 37, 55, 145 Maastricht, 53 Macedonia, 107, 112, 113, 120, 181 Madagascar, 230 Madeira, 215 Madrid, 213 Magyars, 107, 134—137 Mahaffy, Provost, 179 Mahomet 11. , 162 Malays, 239 Malta, 154, 159 Man, Isle of, 80 Manatt, Prof., 188 Margaret, Queen, 195 Marmora, Sea of, 170, 191 Mazagan, 235 Meath, 59 Mecca, 171 Medina, 171 Mesopotamia, 173 Metternich, 150 Metz, 27, 37, 250 Midia, 170 Milosh Dynasty (Serbia), 118 Minorca, 212 Mirdites (Albania), 123 Mitylene, 188 258 INDEX Moesia, 103 Moldau, River, 132 Moldavia, 105 Mombasa, 248 Mongols, 85, 91 seq., 133, 160 Mons, 47 Monte Carlo, 153, 158 Montenegro, 114—117, 119, 157, 168 Moravia, 131—132 Morgan, Sir Henry, 233 Morocco, 235 Moscow, 90 Moselle, River, 37, 55 Mozambique, 235—236 Napoleon I., 19, 31, 44, 126, 154 Napoleon III., 38 Navarino, Battle of, 184 Navarre, 210 Nechte, River, 54 Netherlands, 18, 44—58 Neuchatel, 203 New York, 238 Nice, 38, 151—152 Nimwegen, 54 Nish (Serbia), 121 Normandy, 41, 81 Northmen in France, 39 Northumbria, 70 Norway, 193—197, 227 Novibazar, 119 OsTEND East India Company, 237 Ostende, 53 Ottokar, King of Bohemia, 129 Oxford, 81 Pacific, 234, 243 Palatinate, 16 Palestine, 174 Panama Canal, 232, 240 Panama, Old, 233 Pan-Germanism, 20 — 22 Pango Pango, 243 Pan-Slavism, 88 Paoli Revolt (Corsica), 154 Paris, 35—36, 105 Paris, Matthew, 15—16 Patmos, 188 Peacock, W., 122 Pelasgi, 121 Peloponnesian War, 120 Persian Gulf, 173 Peter the Great, 197 Petrograd, 88, 197, 226 Phanariotes (Greeks of Con- stantinople), 183 PhHip II., 45, 48, 213 Pisa, 153 Pittsburgh, 231 Plevna, 105 Po, River, 149 Poland, Poles, 16, 29—30, 91, 93—96, 132—134, 142, 168 Pomaks, 110 Port Arthur, 227 Porto Lago, Bulgaria, 111, 187 Portugal, 47, 213—215, 235— 237 Posen, 29 Potsdam, 241 Prague, 132 INDEX 259 Pressburg, 120 Prussia, Prussians, 23, 20, 203, 237 Pyrenees, Peace of, 37 Pyrenee Mountains, 38, 157, 208 seq. Pyrrhus, 121 Quebec, 40, 231 Ranks, 161 Red Branch (Ireland), 69 Regensburg, 130 Renaissance, 163, 217, 240 Rhine, River, 19, 37, 44, 54 Rhodes, 188 Richard, King of the Romans, 15 Riesen Gebirge, 132 Riga, 96 Roman Empire, 71, 102, 178— 179, 208 Roman Empire, Holy (me- di^val), 11—19, 49, 126, 130, 202 Romania, 90, 93, 102—108, 128, 131, 134—135, 139— 140, 192 Romansh (Switzerland), 205 Rome, 11, 17 Rose, Dr. Holland, 240 Rumelia, 110 Ruric, 84 Russia, 83—101, 191, 223—228 Ruthenians, 133—134, 139 Rycaut (British traveller), 164 Sadowa, 127 Sagas, 79, 193 St. Sophia, 169, 190 Salisbury, Marquis of, 31 Salonica, 165, 186, 192 Salzburg, 130 Samoa, 243 Samos, 188 San Marino, 157 San Stefano, 110 Saraievo, 142 Sardinia, 153 Savoy, 38, 152, 205 Saxony, 16, 131 Scanderbeg, 121 Scandinavia, 193—201 Schelde, River, 53 Schleswig, 23, 198—200 • Scodra (Scutari), 123 Scotland, 70—73, 78 " Scrap of paper," 52 Seljuk Turks, 160 Septimius Severus, 70 Serbia, Serbs, 89, 109, 114— 120 Seton-Watson, R. W., 89, 156 Shakespeare, 78, 143 Shantung (China), 243 Sharon, Plain of, 173 Shkypetars (Albanians), 120 Shrewsbury, 74 Siberia, 92 Silesia, 27 Silistria, 107 Simplon Pass, 205 Singapore, 176 Slavonia, 131, 135, 138, 142 Slavs, 83—101, 104, 108—124, 128, 135—136, 142—143, 156, 184 gloval^, 136 260 INDEX Slovenians, 136 Sobieski (Polish king), 94 Sophia, 186 Soudan, 168 South Africa, 97, 221 Spain, 102, 208—213, 232—234 Spliigen Pass, 205 StambolofE (Bulgarian states- man), 111 Stephen Nemanja, 115 Stephen of Hungary, St., 137 Stockholm, 196 Strassburg, 36 Styria, 130 Suez Canal, 232 Suleyman, Sultan, 164, 169 Sweden, Swedes, 84, 98, 193— 197, 240 Switzerland, 21, 36, 129, 202— 207 Sydney, N.S.W., 221 Table Mountain, 238 Tacitus, 44 Tanga, 247—249 Tanganyika, Lake, 247, 299 Tara, 59, 62 Tarik, 209 Tennyson, 116 Tenos, 189 Teutonic knights, 23, 97, 129 Thasos, 188 Theiss, River, 139 Thirty Years' War, 36 Thompson, M. S., 108 Thrace, 104, 112—113 Ticino (Swiss Canton), 154, 205 Ticonderoga, 231 Tientsin, 95, 241 Togoland, 245 Tolstoy, 83, 86 Tournay, 45, 47 Trajan, 103 Transylvania, 106, 136 Trieste, 131, 155 Trim, 60 Tripoli, 188 Tromso, 195 Ts'ingtao, 242 Turgenev, 100 Turkey, Turks, 47, 94, 121, 137 —138, 160—177, 182—184 Tyrol, 130, 142, 155 Uganda, 248 Ujiji, 249 Ukraine, 99 Ulm, 130 Ulster, 66—69 Upsala, 194, 196 Urals, 91, 94, 223 Utrecht, 37, 45 Valenciennes, 37 Valette (Malta), 159 Valona, 123, 156 Vambery, Prof., 224 Vatican, 158 Venice, 131, 155, 188 Venizelos, 187, 189 Versailles, 24 Victoria Nyanza, 248 Vienna, 94, 130, 141, 168—169 Vilna, 95 Vindelicia, 151 Virginia, 97 INDEX 261 Vlachs, 107, 108 Vladimir, 84 Vladivostock, 225 Voltaire, 22, 126 Vosges Mountains, 37 Wage, A. J. B., 108 Waldemar Atterdag, 195 Wales, 73—75, 78 Wallachia, 105 Walloon, 47 Waterford, 64 Westphalia, Peace of, 36 Wicklow Hills, 60 Windsor, N. S., 231 Yanina, 186 Yemen, 171 York, 81 Yuste (Spanish convent), 49 Zanzibar, 31 Zara, 155 Zollverein, 22, 56 Zuider Zee, 54 BHADBUBY, AGKBW, Sc CO. LB., PBINTKBS, LOXDOX AXO TOyBBIDa« 11 THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY WILL INCREASE TO 50 CENTS ON THE FOURTH DAY AND TO $1.00 ON THE SEVENTH DAY OVERDUE. OCT 12 1936 ^ ? -^ OCT 16l94Qi i SEP 2S_J^^ MAY 15 1944 ma ;261947 /!\l ov48f?f 27Jap'50.flg P#tfi^ ^ a^y\-5g^^^ -*'^^-.4?95:-_i ti 3 i0i;i2 'PXf THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY