The peoples of Europe

by H. J. Fleure

Europe, east and west, thus shows striking contrasts which have fateful consequences; there are also contrasts of importance between north and south. The latitude of most of Europe is such that the sun's rays strike the soil too obliquely to act chemically upon it with sufficient rapidity to decompose fresh material for plant growth as fast as plants use it up. In the Mediterranean region this is hardly the case, but in several parts the soil possibilities are very indifferent, so that our contrast is more between Europe and the Tropics than between north and south in Europe, though it is a valuable clue to many of the differences between the German plain and the Paris basin. Broadly we may say that our latitude has made a really self-dependent agriculture almost an impossibility for Europe, and we note in illustration that Bohemia is suffering sadly because foreign fertilizers could not be imported in 1914-18. The problem of diminishing fertility has made itself insistent again and again in European life, and has proved a goad to drive men to agricultural experiment on the one hand and to trade as a supplementary source of wealth on the other. The contrast between Europe and many parts of China in this respect is a profitable study, if we do not exaggerate, as is so often done, the supposed stagnation of the Orient.

From trade the men of Europe have been lured on into large-scale industry with the application of coal, oil, water, and sundry other forms of power in immense amounts. The opportunities for domination and consequently exploitation which this has brought are working out fatefully for us all in many varieties of hurtful contacts, needing humanization most urgently if the situation is to be saved for our children.

The process of change, we realize, has progressed faster and farther in the west than in the east of Europe, which goes forward against the pressure of severe inhibitions that make its problems differ from our own. At times we are content to look down upon the wild ways of East and South-east Europe, forgetting that in many respects, such as the exposure of severed heads recently commented upon as happening in the Balkans, we were not long ago at least as wild as they seem to be now. But we must also guard against the thought that they are merely some steps behind us on the path we all are treading; that concept of human evolution as a procession along a path is a wrong and very misleading one. We must reach the broader view which thinks of East Europe not as undeveloped West, but as diverse.

In our changeful continent we may thus follow out one of the most varied and perilous of the stories of men, a story of hardly-won triumph over serious obstacles, triumph maintained for a while in the face of serious threats that never ceased. It is a story that leads us to the appreciation of Europe's precarious position of industrial and administrative leadership, with its implications of conflict and unsettlement that make our Chinese friends think of us as the White Peril.

We may study our physical racial origins and see how every modern European people has come to be composed of moderately diverse elements, probably attaining some of their present characteristics during the marked changes of climate and opportunity accompanying the retreat of the glaciers at the close of the great Ice Age of Europe, and developing them further with changes of location and opportunity in subsequent times. We may see, as it were afar off, facts that will be clearer to the scientific men of fifty years hence, facts of the Mendelian inheritance of physical characters, leading, on the one hand, to the maintenance of types very little changed even through thousands of years, and on the other to the combination of diverse heritages from many sources, making an individual in many cases a mosaic of characteristics from different ancestral types.

We may study the languages and religions of European peoples and see that in the days before writing and markets became features of local life, languages changed, albeit slowly, spreading in waves of civilization, with only a subordinate relation to the waves of racial type. And if languages spread in waves of civilization, this has been the case still more in matters of religion, though folk tradition has a remarkable power of resurgence that leads to the local adaptation of religious movements time after time.

We may finally study economic activities and follow their influence in waves, the power and direction of which are affected by racial facts because temperament is no doubt related to physical type, but are more governed by language distributions because difference of language makes such a bar to economic intercourse, at least in early stages. In later stages, with the utilization of coal and steam the international web is woven more closely and more subtly, and this has sadly aggravated the catastrophe due to its rupture by the clumsiness of politicians in the years leading on to 1914.

And all through the process of evolution of races, of language and religion and of industry, we may follow the social life of the European peoples and the development of its organization and its expression in response to those processes of evolution. We must see at the same time how it both affects and reflects alterations which are always occurring in the European environment through changes of climate, rising and sinking of the land, clearing of forests and draining of swamps by mankind, development of communications, and other results of the labour of man.