The peoples of Europe

by H. J. Fleure

In Yugoslavia there are groups in the Backa, between the lower Theiss and the Danube, and in the Banat.

The enlarged Rumania has a number of German groups in the metalliferous district east of the Banat, between the upper Maros and the upper Alt, especially near Sibiu (formerly Hermannstadt), around Cluj (formerly Kolozsvar) and Bistrita (Bistritz), in Bukovina, and also in southern Bessarabia.

Numerous groups are studded along the Bug and around the southern side of the Pripet Marshes. In South Russia there are again several groups in the Odessa region and north of the Sea of Azov. Still larger numbers live along the Volga in the Saratov region. The German settlements in Transylvania, often loosely styled Saxon, date in large part from the twelfth century, and the people came in considerable numbers from the Rhine in its 'Low German' section; the Bukovina and Russian areas received their German influx towards the end of the eighteenth century.

5
Some Peoples intermediate between Romance and
Germanic in speech

Having now referred to Italians, French, and Germans, it seems appropriate to invite consideration of the Swiss people, so marked a unit in European life in spite of differences of language, religion, and economic activity. A very early but apparently incomplete development of the settled life on lake shores was correlated with a good deal of seasonal and other migration of people using the hill pastures in summer and developing dairying activities. Feudal localism came in as on the more open areas round about, but did not take such root as it did on the richer plains, so that though, with exceptions ([p. 23]), the form of speech approximated to that of surrounding lands (Italian, French, and Alemannic), political domination by the surrounding lands was strongly and, in the end, successfully resisted. The landed aristocracy in the end either left the poor territory (parts of Neuchatel) or gave up their privileges and merged in the people as leaders (especially in French and German Switzerland); they had to be a noblesse de campagne rather than a noblesse de cour, and the fate of the former, even in France, but much more in Norway and in Finland, has been to merge itself in the people. There has been a persistence of localism without the accompaniment of feudalism, and the cantons have democratized their government to a remarkable degree, developing pacific ideals combined with zeal for local defence. They now furnish a most interesting example of a strong union for defensive purposes with little possibility of the passing of defence into aggression. Centuries of poverty have led to emigration and to a keenness on intellectual equipment paralleled in Scotland, Denmark, and modern Wales, but reaching a unique level in Switzerland with its seven institutions of university rank and their relatively enormous student population. The value of the Swiss Universities has brought them students from all over the world, and the hospitality of Switzerland to refugees and to tourists has made the country a most important international centre, as the Red Cross and the League of Nations head-quarters testify. Side by side with this has grown the importance of Switzerland as a banking centre, this line of work being much promoted by the growing tension in economic relations in Europe, due to the huge development of militarist aggression since 1895. Another aspect of this development of banking has been that connected with the industrial transformation of several parts of Switzerland through application of hydro-electric power, a process which has brought Switzerland into closer relation with South Germany and North Italy, and has made her external commerce an important matter. It need hardly be said that Switzerland's hospitality to refugees has brought her craftsmen, thinkers, and artists for centuries, and has thus enormously enriched her life. The debts of Holland and of the British Isles to refugees from the intellectual elite of other lands may be compared with that of Switzerland. In Britain the families at the centre of the commercial and intellectual life of our cities are often closely bound up with groups of refugees, as their association with Unitarian Churches and the Society of Friends often shows.

Another region which may appropriately be treated after consideration of the Romance and the German Teutonic peoples is the British Isles. Reference has already been made to the British and Irish peoples in the chapter on races ([p. 11]) and the section on the Celtic languages ([p. 18]). It was there suggested that these islands were a remote fringing region in ancient times, and as such retain old types of long-headed men, with comparatively little alteration, such as the types of Combe Capelle man of Aurignacian times, the related river-bed types, and the long-barrow types of later, but probably still pre-Bronze Age, times.

At the dawn of the Bronze Age came others, mainly broad-headed types, among whom we can distinguish the brawny, rough-browed 'Beaker-making' people found in the round barrows and surviving, much refined in some cases, in the modern population, the strongly built and sometimes tall, dark broad-heads still found on patches along our western coasts and around the coasts of Ireland, and provisionally identified with the prospectors for tin and copper who spread from the eastern Mediterranean in the third and perhaps the second millennium before Christ, the broad-heads of the short cist graves of our east coasts especially from the Humber to Caithness, the tall longer-headed people of the Iron Age (La Tene) movements, and the descendants of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Vikings, all more or less tall and fair, and for the most part long-headed. The Norman Conquest seems to have brought in broad-heads from across the Channel, as one judges from contents of mediaeval ossuaries, which sometimes contrast strikingly with the modern populations of their districts. It seems likely that the growth of modern industrialism has led to a resurgence of the older and dark long-headed types, which seem able to withstand the evil conditions of the slums to some extent, while the tall, fair long-heads and the descendants of the beaker-makers seem inclined to drift off, unless circumstances allow them to rise to a position of leadership and comfort.

The study of language shows how completely Teutonic speech replaced Celtic, even as regards names of settlements, on the English plain, though eager etymology may have exaggerated this completeness and may have unduly emphasized the change of population supposed to be involved. The fractionation of old elements among the Welsh hills has permitted the old language to survive, though it is now spoken not so much by the physical heirs of the people who brought it to Britain as by the older stocks to whom they taught it. The openness and good centres of the Central Lowland of Scotland were unfavourable to the survival of Celtic, which it was so hard to mingle with Teutonic speech, but this compact region, well marked off from the English plain by the southern uplands, the Cheviots, and the moorlands of north England, kept a sufficient organization (largely of the Celtic Church) through the post-Roman centuries to hand on many of the old place-names and to develop an organized national consciousness at the earliest opportunity. Wales, lacking an administrative centre, has lost its law but kept its language. Scotland, with the great centres of its Central Lowland, has developed its own law, but its old languages are almost gone.