Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/381

 historical gap which separates the Slave of the Baltic from his southern kinsfolk. The work of the Ottoman Turk we all know. These later settlers remain alongside of the Slave, just as the Slave remains alongside of the earlier settlers. The Slavonized Bulgarians are the only instance of assimilation such as we are used to in the West. All the other races, old and new, from the Albanian to the Ottoman, are still there, each keeping its national being and its national speech. And in one part of the ancient Dacia we must add quite a distinct element, the element of Teutonic occupation in a form unlike any in which we see it in the West, in the shape of the Saxons of Transylvania.

We have thus worked out our point in detail. While in each Western country some one of the various races which have settled in it has, speaking roughly, assimilated the others, in the East all the races that have ever settled in the country still abide side by side. And it is important to remark that this phenomenon is not peculiar to the lands which are now under the Turk; it is shared equally with the lands which form the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. We may for the moment set aside those parts of Germany which are so strangely united with the crowns of Hungary and Dalmatia. In those parts of the monarchy which come within our present survey, the Roman and the Rouman — we may so distinguish the Romance-speaking inhabitants of Dalmatia and the Romance-speaking inhabitants of Transylvania — the Slave of the north and of the south, the Magyar conqueror, the Saxon immigrant, all abide as distinct races. That the Ottoman is not to be added to our list in Hungary, while he is to be added in Bulgaria, is simply because he has been driven out of Hungary, while he is allowed to abide in Bulgaria. No point is more important to insist on now than the fact that the Ottoman once held the greater part of Hungary by exactly the same right, the right of the strongest, as that by which he still holds Bosnia and Bulgaria. It is simply the result of a century of warfare, from Sobieski to Joseph the Second, which has fixed the boundary which to diplomatists seems eternal. That boundary has advanced and gone back over and over again. As Buda once was Turkish, Belgrade has more than once been Austrian. In the old days of Austrian intolerance, the persecuted Protestant of Hungary deemed the yoke of the sultan less heavy than that of the emperor-king. In days of better rule in the Hungarian kingdom, the Servian rayah welcomed the emperor-king as his deliverer from the sultan. The whole of these lands, from the Carpathian Mountains southward, present the same characteristic of permanence and distinctness among the several races which occupy them. The several races may lie, here in large continuous masses, there in small detached settlements; but there they all are in their distinctness. It would be hard to trace out in these lands a State of the same scale as any of the great States of western Europe which should consist of one race, language, or religion. The point to be specially borne in mind is that this characteristic belongs equally to the Austrian and to the Turkish empire, and that the frontier which divides the two is a purely artificial one, the result of several fluctuations during the wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Now this lasting and distinct character of races in these lands leads to a geographical feature which is quite unlike anything to which we are now used in western Europe, but which was familiar enough in ancient times. We may say that, till the establishment of the Roman Empire, it was the rule in the lands round the Mediterranean that the seaboard and the inland part of a country should be held by distinct nations. First Phœnician, then Greek colonies spread themselves over the greater part of the Mediterranean, Ægæan, and Euxine coasts. But they nowherer went very far inland. Thus the group of Greek cities of which Massalia was the head were scattered along the Mediterranean coast of Gaul and northern Spain; but in the interior of the country they had no influence beyond a purely commercial one. The land was Celtic or Iberian, with a Greek fringe on the coast. The Roman power put an end to this state of things as far as political dominion was concerned. Throughout the empire, the seacoast and the interior, whatever were the race and speech of their inhabitants, were alike Roman in allegiance. But with the great Slavonic movement of the sixth and seventh centuries the older state of things revived in south-eastern Europe, and it has, to a great extent, remained to our day. The seacoast and the interior of the land have again parted company. A map of Europe in the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, carefully marking the dominions of the eastern emperors, brings out this 