Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/477

Rh its official speech upon the people, where it remains to-day. Were the present Spanish nation old enough and sufficiently unified; were the component parts of it more firmly knitted together by education, modern means of transport, and economic interests; this disunity of speech might disappear. Unfortunately, the character of the Iberian Peninsula is such—arid, infertile, and sparsely populated in the interior—that these languages socially and commercially turn their backs to one another. Of necessity, they do this also along the frontier between Spain and Portugal. The eyes of each community are directed not toward Madrid, but toward the sea; for there on the fertile littoral alone, is there the economic possibility of a population sufficiently dense for unification. Thus the divergence of language is truly the expression of natural causes working through political ones, which promise to perpetuate the differences for some time. As for the Basques, they have been politically independent both of the French and the Spaniards until within a few years, and have been enabled to preserve their unique speech largely for this reason. But now that their political autonomy has begun to disappear, the official Spanish is pressing the Basque language so forcibly that it seems to be everywhere on the retreat.

We have seen that community of language is often imposed as a result of political unity. But it is, after all, rather a by-product, so that it often fails even here to indicate nationality. Its irresponsibility in respect both of nationality and of race is clearly indicated by the present linguistic status of the British Isles. As our map shows, the Keltic language is now spoken in the remote and mountainous portions of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as across the English Channel in French Brittany. Are we to infer from this that in these several places we have to do with vestiges of a so-called Keltic race which possesses any physical traits in common? Far from it! For, although in a few places racial differences occur somewhere near the linguistic frontiers, as in Wales and Brittany, they are all the more misleading elsewhere for that reason. Within the narrow confines of this spoken Keltic language are to be found populations characterized by all the extremes of the races of Europe. The dark-haired, round-faced Breton peasant speaking the Kymric branch of the Keltic tongue is, as we shall hope to demonstrate, physically as far removed from the Welshman who uses the same language, as from the tall and blue-eyed Norman neighbor in France