RACE, LANGUAGE, AND CULTURE AS FACTORS OF UNITY
Precedence has been given in our inquiry to the mere animal struggle of man with nature for bare subsistence, for two distinct reasons. The first is economic, namely, that just because this struggle is without qualification that of a highly intelligent animal species to maintain itself under these or those conditions, it is one which befalls equally every breed or race of that species which is ever exposed to those conditions; and further, is no more mitigated by considerations of language than by considerations of race. The second reason is historical or archaeological. The spread of the Bread culture is dated so far back in the history of man in this region, as to make it certain that it preceded not merely the spread of the prevalent Indo-European group of languages, but even the present distribution of racial types. It certainly reached Italy, and the Atlantic seaboard as the British Isles, before the brachycephalic 'Alpine' men arrived there; and still more before the Boreal invasions of Britain and the opposite coasts. Indeed, it would be truer to say that in general each breed of man which has changed its distribution has had to adopt sooner or later the types of culture appropriate to the regions into which it has penetrated, than to associate the spread of any element of culture so fundamental as the food-quest with the migrations of any racial type.
Race, indeed, in Europe, as well as further afield, has been anything but a factor of unity. When we speak (on platforms) of Europeans as 'white men', we are in danger of forgetting, what every practical man in our audience knows, that we are dealing with at least three distinct breeds of mankind, which agree, indeed, rather imperfectly in the whiteness of their skin, but differ greatly in other points of structure and physique, including resistance to certain types of climate and regional diseases, and not least in temperament and the quality of their response to Nature's challenges of hardship or indulgence. Of these three breeds of man, only one, the blond Boreal giants (the only 'white men' in the strict sense of defect of pigment in skin, hair, and eyes) is exclusively European now, and has his habitat within the area of the 'Boreal' groups of animals and plants. His champions in ethnological propaganda seem to be of two minds about his earlier distribution; either his 'home' was round the Baltic, in which case it is difficult to see why he should be represented as a civilizing agency, in view of the cultural backwardness of that region; or else it was out on the Eurasian grassland, in which case he is as much an intruder into peninsular Europe as his brachycephalic 'Alpine' rival, and his claim to represent indigenous European man must go. The large part which he has played in European history seems to result partly from his great physical strength, surpassed (I believe) only by that of the Negro, partly from his reluctance, not so much to interbreed with more pigmented strains, but to admit the crossbred offspring to full partnership with himself. Even among his like, he has his own criteria by which one 'white man' knows another, and coheres with him politically.
Most strongly contrasted externally with the 'Boreal' type is the slight-built Mediterranean brunet. That his home is in the south, that he is closely related with the men of the African and Arabian grasslands, and that he was among the first post-glacial explorers of the Atlantic seaboard, is admitted. More doubt arises as to the extent to which he penetrated from these southern and western bases into the heart of peninsular Europe. Certainly as we trace him to the south-east he seems more and more restricted to the Mediterranean coastline, and at last has no early monopoly even of the islands. The contrast between Crete and Cyprus is instructive as to this. The 'Mediterranean' type, in fact, reaffirms to the anthropologist the close zoological affinity between South-west Europe and North-west Africa.
But if Europe 'ends at the Pyrenees', it ends also anthropologically at the Balkans, or even at the Carpathians; for the whole Balkan Peninsula, and most of the highland core of peninsular Europe, is essentially continuous with Asia Minor and the next eastward sections of the Mountain Zone, so far as its human population is concerned, no less than in its animals and plants. Biological continuity is as complete at the Bosphorus as it is at Gibraltar. Here, what remains in dispute is not so much whether 'Alpine' types are ultimately of Anatolian origin, as whether their spread in Europe has been early or late, and whether their predecessors here were predominantly 'Boreal' or 'Mediterranean'. It is difficult, and perhaps needless, to decide whether lack of evidence or political enthusiasm is more to blame for this; for the Roundheads of prehistoric and of modern Europe are as contentious matter as their English namesakes in the seventeenth century.
To this broadly threefold analysis of European man, add only this, that ever since the old 'Sarmatian' sea shrank to its present dimensions and left the grasslands open between Tienshan and the Carpathians, there has been a steady westward movement of Mongoloid folk until a strong enough Muscovy was interposed; and that along the Northern Woodland also there has been westward movement, slower but no less persistent; and it will be clear that it is not to race that we have to look for any uniform basis of our European culture.
Nor is such a basis to be found in Language. People often speak of Indo-European speech as though they really confused linguistic affinity with mutual intelligibility. But if you want to test the unifying influence of kindred languages, get a Welshman, a German, a Russian, and a Greek into a room together, and see what the 'concert of Europe' amounts to. The odds are that if they confer at all, they will do so in French, which is in the strict sense of the word a 'modern' language; while if you allowed them to write and gave them time, there is just a chance that the Greek would impose his language on the other three.
There is no need to labour this point further than to recall the fateful bisection of the culture of the European peninsula which resulted from the linguistic alienation of Constantinople from Rome; of the Mediterranean base which understood Latin, from that which thought in Greek. In this tragic respect, which the Turkish conquest, with its linguistic and religious sequel, has done little more than aggravate, Europe ends still at the Save; whereas Rome's greatest daughters have reconquered more than all that Carthage ever held in Africa. And the re-incorporation of Britain, too, into the comity of nations is concurrent with the Latinization of its speech, on which the seal was set in 1611. Late as it was, then, in any case, in the prehistory of the region, the spread of a single type of linguistic structure over Europe has brought not peace, but a sword.
What then of Religion? How far were the older ethnologists on the right lines, when (in spite of language, rather than aided by it) they co-ordinated their own Olympus with the confederate polytheisms of the North? Here, too, we have to keep the dates in mind, and clear ourselves of enthusiasms. It is not from Tacitus or Caesar, nor even so near to the Olympians' dwelling-place as the Thrace of Herodotus' time, that we get our modern impression of the nearness of Olympus to Asgard. If northern genealogies are any guide,—and they are not likely to have reduced the real interval wittingly—Rome's empire reached its full extent while Asgard was in building, or before. And Olympus was in building, by Greek accounts, not many generations before the Trojan War. In both cases we are dealing with political and almost historical transactions; it was not in finished societies like these that Great Gods (or their votaries either) set out from 'home' over the face of Europe to unite it.
And when we pass behind Olympian structures, and look into the cults which they served to federate, such uniformities as they present prove far too much. The open-air gods of Tacitus (Germania, chap. 9) are common to Semitic folk, and to many peoples further afield, who are either not sedentary or are themselves not easily 'confined within walls', but haunt 'forests and groves'.