Page:Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).djvu/71

Rh and its appendant island of Britain. Fifteen hundred miles north-eastward, measured in a straight line, trends the oceanic coast from the Sacred Promontory of the ancients to the Straits at Copenhagen, and fifteen hundred miles eastward, measured in the same way, lies the sinuous Mediterranean coast from the Sacred Promontory to the Straits at Constantinople. A lesser peninsula advances towards the main peninsula at each strait, Scandinavia on the one hand, and Asia Minor on the other; and behind the land bars so formed are two landgirt basins, the Baltic and Black Seas. If Britain be considered as balancing Italy, the symmetry of the distal end of the main peninsula is such that you might lay a Latin Cross upon it with the head in Germany, the arms in Britain and Italy, the feet in Spain, and the centre in France, thus typifying that ecclesiastical empire of the five nations which, though shifted northward, was the mediæval heir of the Roman Cæsars. Towards the East, however, where the Baltic and Black Seas first begin to define the peninsular character of Europe, the outline is less shapely, for the Balkan peninsula protrudes southward, only tapering finally into the historic little peninsula of Greece.

Is it not tempting to speculate on what