Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/25

 process of national integration, as its counterpart or inverse.

Look at this little collection of maps, showing different projects for a partition of Turkey. I took them from the book of Mr Djuvara, who counts a hundred of these projects, beginning as early as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and half of them are earlier than the eighteenth century, i.e. before the beginning of a real dislocation of Turkey, Compare these maps with the ethnographic map of the Balkan Peninsula. You will see how these early projects for the partition of Turkey make a clean slate of its ethnographic composition. Here, for instance, Father Coppin contrives to give something to everybody, to France, and to England, to Spain, to Modena and Parma, to the Pope and to Venice,—and all that on the very small spot of the Morea, which he divides into six parts. Next, Mr Carra, a Girondist executed by the Jacobins during the French Revolution, gives Prussia a place on the Danube and the Black Sea. Others cut to the quick in the living but torpid bodies of nations, drawing lines from north to south, or from west to east, of the Balkan Peninsula. Looking at some of the later maps, you will see that the vacuum begins to fill up with living matter, and will notice how political frontiers of projected local kingdoms begin to coincide with national or religious divisions. Well, this change in political cartography reflects in itself the whole story of the Eastern Question. The real dislocation of the