Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/60

50 short, it applies to-day to an entirely artificial concept—nationality—the product of time and place. Religious, linguistic, and in large measure political differences have merged themselves in a sympathetic unity. Thus has the original meaning of the word Deutsch—a people or nation—come to its truest expression at last.

The fact is that nationality need not of necessity imply any greater uniformity of ethnic origin than of either linguistic or religious affiliations. Such we have seen is the case in Trance and Italy. Especially clear are the two distinct racial elements in the latter case. Now in Germany, on the northern slopes of the main European watershed, we are confronted with a great nation, whose constituent parts are equally divergent in physical origin. With the shifting of scene, new actors participate, although the plot is ever the same. This time it is not a question of the Alpine and Mediterranean races. The Alpine element remains, but the Teuton replaces the other. Briefly stated, the situation is this: northwestern Germany—Hanover, Schleswig-Holstein, Westphalia—is distinctly allied to the physical type of the Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes. All the remainder of the empire—no, not even excluding Prussia, east of the Elbe—is less Teutonic in type, until finally in the essentially Alpine broad-headed populations of Baden, Würtemberg, and Bavaria, in the south the Teutonic race passes from view. The only difference, then, between Germany and France in respect of race is that the northern country has a little more Teutonic blood in it. As for that portion of the empire which was two generations ago politically distinct from Prussia, the South German Confederation, it is in no wise racially distinguishable from central France. Thus has political history perverted ethnology; and, notwithstanding, each nation is probably the better for the blend, however loath it may be to acknowledge it.