It is conceivable that by reason of exhausted material resources—coal, iron, etc.—our present splendid civilization, in the course of a few thousand years, will disappear; leaving here and there, perhaps, in some happy isle of the Pacific seas, a prosperous and cultivated population descended from some surviving element of the present American stock. Peering painfully through the mists of tradition, they have vague glimpses of ancestral races fighting for supremacy in a vast continental war—the Yenghees in the North and the Dixees in the South—remote ancestral races in internecine conflict.
It was thus with the Teutonic and Scandinavian races of to-day. In far-off Central Asia, beyond the Caspian Sea and beyond the definite historic boundaries of the past, they see great races in perpetual movement of migration or war; multitudinous peoples; two distinct groups or divisions; but all of one race. As they emerge into the twilight of history—into the savage gloaming betwixt the dog and the wolf—the observer recognizes two races, the Teutones and the Gothones, or Goths. The vast migratory columns of the former take possession of Central Europe. The other column,—the kindred Gothones or Goths,—making its exit from Central Asia, sweeps along the valley of the Vistula, follows the southern shores of the Baltic Sea, and moving to the mouths of the Elbe and the Rhine directs its columns of colonization into Denmark and the Danish Islands, and to the vast Scandinavian peninsula of the north. As the northern column loitered along the shores of the Baltic they gathered great quantities of amber from the sea, which with early instincts of commercial thrift they sold to the Teutones on the south, by whom, with early mechanic aptitude, it was wrought into many exquisite and profitable shapes for the markets of the world. "Made in Germany" is an antique trademark in the history of men, and there is a pleasant, if trivial, significance in the circumstance that the first historic article of traffic between these primitive races—the founders of modern civilization—was the substance which first manifested the property of "electricity" to the eyes of man.
But in pursuing this inquiry we are less concerned in ascertaining the exact relations of the ancestral kinsmen than in studying the ethnic material (in this instance the Scandinavian) which was molded or modified by the geographical milieu. What was the moral geography of the race? Why should the Norseman differ from his kindred Teuton in the South? There may have been original differences in the psychology of race which made one, for example, an explorer and trader, and the other an unrivaled artisan and exploiter. But there is something to be considered in the plastic influence of the physical and social conditions. It is no melodramatic assumption, for example, to declare that no slave could live in the free air of Scandinavia. Not because the air is "free," but because the soil is thin. The slave could not subsist himself, much less pay tribute to a lord. If slavery or serfage was impossible, a nobility was equally so. Where subsistence was scant, accumulation was at least slow. Wealth could not exist as a basis of privilege, and class legislation upon primogeniture gave support to this natural law. The "five" and "fifty" acre holdings could not be consolidated into big estates. The rocky ridges, the high levels, the nipping airs, the thin, worn soil, the short seasons, and the fleeting harvests were conditions fatal to the growth of feudalism. Retainers were superfluous where slaves could not make their keep. Fish from the sea, a little pasturage in the glens—that was all. No smiling abundant harvests; no patient laborious thralls, no baronial bas or boss; none of those iron Teutonic laws that not only shaped the conditions of society but wrought changes in the very soul of man. The Scandinavians were not Germans or Saxons or Angles or Celts. This rocky Scandinavian peninsula was cradling the masters of the world. They were literally driven by their wild, arid nurse to follow the furrows of the sea and recast the corrupted civilizations of the earth. Between the sheltering group of islands that fringe the western front of Norway and curtain the main shore, there is a broad passage of the sea where a navy of dragon-prows might float secure from observation or attack. Near the center of this insular barrier, Rolf Ganger—the greatest force of that hyperborean world—had constructed a system of dry-docks, from which, in the idle hours of summer and autumn, he launched those portentous fleets of dragons and serpents that sailed upon every sea and ravaged the most distant shores. From one point of view, it was a nest of Scandinavian free-booters; from another, it was the naval station of a great sea-faring race—a race that, having failed as traders in amber and timber and fish, were now about to try their luck in ravage and loot upon the gravelly loams of the Cheviot Hills and deep in the sunny heart of France.
COLONEL RICHARD M. JOHNSON.
William the Conqueror was fifth in descent from this great Captain of the northern seas—the potential reconstructor of the modern world.
[XV]
When the great Gothic column of migration, sweeping past the Caspian and crossing the Asian frontier, followed the river valleys and the shores of the Baltic Sea, making a reconnoissance in force that reached as far as the waters of the northern sea, it pushed its exploring columns through every part of Scandinavia, peopling every shore it passed, and leaving every promontory and peninsula in every nook and hook and cranny and on every continental headland, every island inlet, and in every peaceful arm of the Danish seas strewn with the wrecks of the migrant column, battered by the hardships of a long, unbroken march. Only the strong survived. The weak and unenterprising, as the head of the resistless column bent toward the northern sea, shrank from the toils and terrors of a march in a northern clime. Upon these geographical points of "refuge" the racial weaklings had been gathering for years. Nothing stayed the mighty Goth. The Norman could turn the sharpest corners in the Danish world. Once planted in the footsteps of a pioneer, even a phlegmatic Teuton might pursue his way. But the exhausted weakling dropped in his tracks, and crawled to the shelter of some inviting angulus or nook. Here they were—the drift in the eddy of an archipelagic sea. Jutes from Jutland (in Denmark); Saxons from the shores to the south; Angles, from the Anglen in Sleswick—in all a seething colluvian of ethnic stragglers swarming for an ultimate raid upon British soil. The great Teutonic nation was seemingly planted on the best lands of Central Europe; the great Scandinavian people lay far to the north; the Jutes, the Angles, the Saxons, the Frisians, lay between;—the Angli, who gave their name to England, lying at the point (Angulus) where the coast of the Baltic first bends sharply toward the north. Are these the peoples that gave substance and strength and splendor to the English race? The men who fall out in a forced march (said a great Virginian captain) are not the men to stand up in a long fight.