Page:The Bohemian Review, vol2, 1918.djvu/203

 dals, Huns, or Teutons, and equally different from such planned and organized military-colonial extensions as those of Rome. That the process was not always peaceful, however, or gentle, we know well from the earlier history of the Balkans.

Once having occupied a new territory the Slavs made this promptly their home. Their universal occupations of agriculture and husbandry constituted them at once true colonists, who soon became firmly rooted to the soil and were hard to displace. In addition they brought qualities of ready adaptation to new conditions as well as to new neighbors, together with other assets which favored a ready assimilation of the remnants of native populations; though in some localities and from the same reasons in the course of time they became assimilated themselves into stronger alien groups.

The Slavs spread until they occupied all the territories between the Baltic and the Ægean and from the Elbe to the Volga and eventually the Far East. In the course of the Middle Ages they lost some of these territories by denationalization. The Slav groups between the Elbe and the lands of the Poles were absorbed by the Germans, those of Pannonia were gradually assimilated in a large measure by the German Austrians, those of the Central bulk of Hungary suffered Magyarization, while in the south and west of the Balkan peninsula gains were made at their expense by the Greeks and Illyrians (Albanians). Some serious results of these changes were the severing of the southern Slavs from the main Slav body by a broad Magyar-German patch; while the westernmost Czechs became hemmed in on three sides by the Germans. But while blocked and suffering losses in the west the Slav strain kept on gaining in eastern Europe and then in Asia, so that the total territory they occupied towards the beginning of the present century was greater than that covered by them ever before in their history.

With the territorial changes and new contacts, however, and in the course of the centuries, some far-reaching internal developments took place in the Slav world. Originally according to all indications they were but one great strain of people of the same blood. They had the same language, the same habits, and the same naturalistic religion, with Perun, the Great Thunderer, as its chief deity. They also had throughout the same family and clan organization, on cherished democratic foundations, but apparently without possessing ever a single central government that would embrace the whole or even large groups of the population. As time advanced, however, and with increasing territorial distances, dialects appeared, and the clans or groups of clans began to form separate streams or bodies, which progressed according to circumstances and in instances by outside intervention, to political and geographic units, more or less independent of each other—the eventual Slav nations and countries. Under the influence of non-Slavic peoples the dialects of these units grew gradually farther apart, detrimental differences in faith were introduced from without, and the groups followed in large measure their separate destinies, at times even contending with each other; but there was never lost a strong basic feeling of common parentage and mutual sympathy, a feeling which in the recent epoch and among the more cultured groups became largely responsible for the so-called Pan-Slavism, the great bug-bear before the war of the guilty conscience of both Germany and AustriaHungary.

The groups which have arisen from the original Slav leaven were (and are) as follows: