CHAPTER V.
THE HORSE IN HISTORY.
I. THE DAPPLED HORSE OF EUROPE.
THE BALTIC PEOPLE. The Baltic, which once drained through Lapland to the Arctic, became, as the icefields melted, a land-locked lake until a local sinkage of the rocks opened its Danish channels into the Atlantic. At the same period the North Sea was eating its way up the old vale of North River.
The melting of the icefields had left these Baltic and North-River Provinces of Cloudland an ill-drained country of bare rock wastes, of boulder tracts and clay, cluttered with lakes and swamps. It was long before its damp and frosty soils yielded a scanty crop, eight bushels of wheat, for instance, in Plantaganet England as compared with thirty-six bushels, the present average. The only wealth was that of fisheries in cold and deadly shallows.
Here, in a rapidly improving climate, was a school of manhood which educated poor savages who lived on shell-fish, driving them by straits of famine to exercise a varied skill as fishers, hunters and farmers with the changing seasons. As these people always bred more bairns than they could feed, their overcrowding led to bickerings, and mutual recrimination weeded out all but the best fighters, while pestilence swept away those who were not not quite hardy. The blue-eyed, fair-haired ruddy folk of Cloudland grew tenacious of life, and very hard to kill, thrifty, austere, fiercely self-governing. Never has the world known men more formidable, adventurous, abler or more daring than these Vikings of the northern seas, and pioneers by land who set forth out of Cloudland to find homes. They had a strong preference for other people's homes.
The Baltic folk
To realise the temper of the Baltic, glance for a moment at the old quest for cod, and the curing stations for stock-fish which formed a series of stepping-stones to bridge the North Atlantic, and so led to the discovery of North America. The founding by blonde adventurers of the Hohenstaufen and Romanov dynasties, and of the British kingdom, are Baltic roots from whence have grown the German, Russian, British and American world powers holding dominion over half the Earth. All that steam is to the mechanism of the planet, or to our own industrial engineering, the Baltic Force has been in history.
Long before the dawn of historic times the Baltic region was brewing human storms, which swept outward in all directions, but mainly into regions toward the sun. It is not blind accident which leads the modern Prussians to seize the coal and iron fields of Belgium, the oilfields of Galicia, or the copper mines of Serbia; for, not only are Baltic storms of overwhelming strength, they are organized by strategists, led by tacticians and concentrate attack upon the most useful countries.
Limitation to conquests
Yet there is always a limitation to the Baltic conquests. When the blonde conquerors seized Greece or Italy, Spain or Asia Minor, districts enclosed by sea and mountain barriers they always held their own. When on the other hand they conquered a country open to attack such as Germany or Russia, Hungary or the Balkans the next wave of the Tartar Hordes has overwhelmed them by sheer weight of numbers. So the early Balkan conquests on the Mediterranean were cut off from the homeland by swarms of Asiatics whose dark haired descendants, known as the Alpine stock still hold large mountain regions from the Black Sea to the Rhone.