Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/59

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ERMANIA! A word entirely foreign to the Teutonic speech of northern Europe. Deutschland then, the country of the Deutsch—not Dutch, for they are really Netherlander. What do these words mean? What territories, what peoples do they comprehend? The Austrians speak as pure German as the Prussians; yet the defeat of Königgratz, barely a generation ago, left them outside of Germany. On the other hand, the Polish peasants of eastern Prussia, with their purely Slavic language, are accounted Germans in good standing to-day.

Ambiguous linguistically, do these words, German or Deutsch, imply any temperamental or religious unity? This can not be, for the main participants in the Thirty Years' War—

were Germans. Historians are accustomed to identify the division line of belief in this conflict with that of racial origin. They are pleased to make the independent, liberty-loving spirit of the Teutonic race responsible for the Protestant Reformation. Let us not be too sure about that. Such bold generalizations are often misleading. Racial boundaries are not so simple in outline. The Prussians and the Prussian Saxons—Martin Luther was one—were anything but pure Teutons racially; this did not prevent them from siding with Prince Christian and Gustavus Adolphus. And then there were the Bohemians who began the revolt, and the Swiss Calvinists, and the rebels of the Peasants' War in Würtemberg! None of these were ethnically Teutons. Let us beware of such ascriptions of a monopoly of virtue or intellect to any given race, however comforting they may be to us who are of Teutonic descent. Modern Germany, to be sure, is half Catholic and half Protestant, but the division was not of ethnic origin in any sense. Thus the word German is even more nondescript religiously than linguistically. In