Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/378

 distinct, still keeping separate tongues, and those for the most part their own original tongues, while in many cases the national distinction is further intensified by a religious distinction. Or rather, till the revival of the strong conscious feeling of nationality in our own times, we might say that the religious distinction, had taken the place of the national distinction. This growth of strictly national feeling has, like most other things, a good and a bad side. It has kindled both Greek and Slave into a fresh and vigorous life, such as had been unknown for ages. On the other hand, it has set Greek and Slave to dispute with one another in the face of the common enemy.

In the great Eastern Peninsula then, and in the lands immediately to the north of that peninsula, the original races, those whom we find there at the first beginnings of history, are all there still. They form three distinct nations. There are the Greeks, if not all true Hellenes, yet an aggregate of adopted Hellenes gathered round and assimilated to a true Hellenic kernel. They form an artificial nation, defined by the union of Greek speech and Orthodox faith. This last qualification is not to be left out; the Greek who turns Mussulman ceases altogether to be Greek, and he who turns Catholic remains Greek only in a very imperfect sense. Here are the oldest recorded inhabitants of a large part of the land abiding, and abiding in a very different case from the remnants of the Celt and the Iberian in western Europe. The Greeks are no survival of a nation; they are a true and living nation, a nation whose importance to the matter in hand is quite out of its proportion to its extent in mere numbers. They still abide, the predominant race in their own ancient and again independent land, the predominant race in those provinces of the Continental Turkish dominion which formed part of their ancient land, the predominant race through all the shores and islands of the Ægean and of part of the Euxine also. In near neighborhood to the Greeks still live another race of equal antiquity, the Skipetar or Albanians. These, as I believe is no longer doubted, represent the ancient Illyrians. The exact degree of their ethnical kindred with the Greeks is a scientific question which lies without the range of practical politics; but the facts that they are more largely intermingled with the Greeks than any of the other neighboring nations, that they show a special power of identifying themselves with the Greeks, a power, so to speak, of becoming Greeks and forming part of the artificial Greek nation, are matters of very practical politics indeed. It must never be forgotten that, among the worthies of the Greek war of independence, some of the noblest were not of Hellenic but Albanian blood. The Christian Albanian thus easily turns into a Greek; and the Mahometan Albanian is something broadly distinguished from a Turk. He has, as he well may have, a strong national feeling, and that national feeling has sometimes got the better of religious divisions. If Albania is among the most backward parts of the peninsula, still it is, by all accounts, the part where there is most hope of men of different religions joining together against the common enemy.

Here then are two ancient races, the Greeks and another race, not indeed so advanced, so important, or so widely spread, but a race which equally keeps a real national being. And I would add, as what is my own belief, though I cannot assert it with the same confidence as in the other two cases, that a third ancient race also survives as a distinct people in the peninsula. These are the Vlachs or Roumans, in whom I am strongly inclined to see the surviving representatives of the great Thracian race. Every one knows that, in the modern principality of Roumania and in the adjoining parts of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, there is to be seen that phenomenon so unique in the East, a people who not only still keep the Roman name, but who speak neither Greek nor Turkish, neither Slave nor Skipetar, but a dialect of Latin, a tongue akin, not to the tongues of any of their neighbors, but to the tongues of Gaul, Italy, and Spain. The assumption has commonly been that this outlying Romance people owe their Romance character to the Roman colonization of Dacia under Trajan. In this view the modern Roumans would be the descendants of Trajan's colonists and of Dacians who had learned of them to adopt the speech and manners of Rome. But when we remember that Dacia was the first Roman province to be given up — that the modern Roumania was for ages the highway of every barbarian tribe on its way from the East to the West — that the land has been conquered and settled 