Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/637

Rh and between; neither one thing nor the other. Surely a part of Europe, its rivers all run to the east and south. "By physical relief it turns its back on Europe," continually inviting settlement from the direction of Asia. It is no anomaly that Asiatic religions, Asiatic institutions, and Asiatic races should have possessed and held it; nor that Europe, Christianity, and the Aryan-speaking races should have resisted this invasion of territory which they regarded in a sense as their own. In this pull and haul between the social forces of the two continents we finally discover the dominant influence, perhaps, which throughout history has condemned this region to political disorder and ethnic heterogeneity.

As little racial as of topographical system can we discover in this Balkan Peninsula. Only in one respect may we venture upon a little generalization. This is suggested by the preliminary bird's-eye view which we must take as to the languages spoken in the peninsula. This was a favorite theme with the late historian Freeman. It is developed in detail in his luminous writings upon the Eastern question. The Slavs have in this part of Europe played a role somewhat analogous to, although less successful than, that of the Teutons in the west. They have pressed in upon the territory of the classic civilizations of Greece and Rome, ingrafting a new and physically vigorous population upon the old and partially enervated one. From some center of dispersion up north toward Russia, Slavic-speaking peoples have expanded until they have rendered all eastern Europe Slavic from the Arctic Ocean to the Adriatic and Ægean Seas. Only at one place is the continuity of Slavdom broken; but this interruption is sufficient to set off the Slavs into two distinct groups at the present day. The northern one, of which we have already treated, consists of the Russians, Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks. The southern group, now before us, comprises the main body of the Balkan peoples from the Serbo-Croatians to the Bulgars, as shown upon the accompanying map. Between these two groups of Slavs—and herein is the significant point—is a broad belt of non-Slavic population, composed, of the Magyars, linguistically now as always Finns; and the Roumanians, who have become Latin in speech within historic times. This intrusive, non-Slavic belt lies along or near the Danube, that great highway over which eastern peoples have penetrated Europe for centuries. The presence of this water way is distinctly the cause of the linguistic phenomenon. Rome went east; and the Finns, like the Huns, went west along it, with the result as described. Linguistically speaking, therefore, the boundary of the southern Slavs and that of the Balkan Peninsula, beginning, as we have said, at the Danube, are one and the same.