Studies in Literature and History
the West. But this aroused equally fierce resistance, and when
Napoleon had been beaten down, the national feeling emerged stronger
than ever. The doctrines of the French Encyclopedistes were inherited
by the English school of Utilitarians, led by Bentham and the two
Mills; and John Stuart Mill in particular, declared that one of the
chief obstacles to human improvement was the tendency to regard
difference of race as indelible. In fact, all this school, which had
considerable influence some forty years ago, treated religious and
social distinctions as inconvenient and decaying barriers against
rational progress, or as fictions invented by indolent thinkers to
save themselves the trouble of investigating the true causes that
modify human character.
There is undoubtedly a certain degree of truth underlying this view.
In the settled nationalities of the West these distinctions of race
and religion have a tendency to become unimportant and obsolete for
political purposes, although a glance across the water to Ireland will
remind us that they have by no means disappeared. What I wish to lay
stress upon is the very serious importance of race and religion,
politically, in other parts of the world, and particularly in some
Asiatic countries with which England is closely connected and
concerned. For, in the first place, there has been a notable revival
of the sentiment of race in Eastern Europe. And, secondly, the spread
of European dominion over Asia may be regarded as one of the most
prominent and powerful movements in the politics of the latter half of
the nineteenth century; one which may become the dominant feature of
politics in the twentieth century. It is this movement that is forcing
upon our serious attention the immense practical importance of race
and religion.
The plan which I shall attempt to follow in making a brief survey of
my subject, is to begin with a glance at the political condition of
Central Europe, and to travel rapidly Eastward. In the West, as I have
said, we have compact and permanently established States with national
governments. But as soon as we pass to Central Europe we find the
Austro-Hungarian empire distracted and threatened by internal feuds,
arising out of the contention for ascendency of two races, Germans and
Slavonians, and also out of the demands of the various provinces and
dependencies for political recognition of their separate identities,
founded on claims to represent internal sections or subdivisions of
the two chief races. The Slavonic populations in the north-west of the
empire are parted asunder from those in the south-east by the
Hungarians, who came in from the east, and are of a different stock,
and who have succeeded in establishing the federated kingdom of
Hungary. I will not trouble you with statistical or geographical
details. For my present purpose it is enough to mention that the
subjects of Austria, apart from Hungary, are classed in eight separate
sections, differentiated by separate languages, and that Poles,
Bohemians, Germans, and Italians, are all and each claiming a kind of
home rule within the empire, and show an increasing tendency to group
themselves by distinctions of race. In Bohemia the population is
nearly equally divided between Germans and Slavs, who speak different
languages, have separate schools, and contend violently for political
preponderance. In Moravia and Silesia, where the Slav element is
stronger, the same conflict goes on. In Galicia the contest is between
Poles and Ruthenians, between the Roman Catholic and the Greek
churches. In Hungary proper the Magyars have political predominance,
but the population of German descent and language is more numerous
than the Magyars: in Transylvania, further eastward, the Magyars are
politically overriding the Slav races; in Croatia to the southward a
similar struggle is going on. Throughout every province of the
Austro-Hungarian empire we see the same intermixture of races,
religions, and languages--the more numerous and better united sections
are striving for political ascendency: the weaker sections contend
against them by demanding autonomy. And, as all these various
antipathies and jealousies are represented in the Parliament of the
empire, the peaceful consolidation of the empire into a large national
State is interrupted by resistance under the watchword of separate
nationalities. Religious differences between Roman Catholicism,
Calvinism, and the Greek Church in the Eastern provinces, accentuate
the incoherence. Each separate group takes for its symbol, the
standard round which people rally, a language--German, Polish,
Tcheque, Ruthenian, and so on. They are all being energetically
maintained and jealously preserved in speech and writing in the
schools and the assemblies. Moreover, three different churches, at
least, are rallying their adherents and driving in the wedge of
religious dissension. All these groups go back to the early traditions
and history of the races, they sharpen up old grievances, and oppose
each other vigorously in the Imperial Chamber of Representatives. They
are, in fact, endeavouring to construct an earlier formation of civil
society, and to reverse the order of political amalgamation of small
States into large ones which has been operating for centuries in
Western Europe. In Western Europe the principle of nationalities has
been a method not of disintegration, but of concentration. It has led
within the last fifty years to the establishment of two States of
first-class magnitude, Germany and Italy; and Louis Napoleon, who had
proclaimed the idea of national unification, was ruined by his own
policy, for the Germans destroyed his dynasty, and Italy gave him no
help. But in Austro-Hungary, on the contrary, the movement is not
toward centralisation--it is centrifugal and separatist; and if it
continues to increase in force it may threaten with dissolution an
ancient and powerful empire.
You will observe that since we entered, in our survey, the Austrian
territories, we have found ourselves within the jurisdiction of an
empire in the true sense of that word, which I take to mean the
dominion of one superior sovereignty over many subordinate races,
tribes, or petty States that obey its authority. I may be permitted to
regard the German emperor as the military head of a constitutional
federation, which is a different thing. Now I think it may be said
that from Austria eastward across South-Eastern Europe and Asia, from
Vienna to Pekin, the general form of government is not national but
imperial. Every government is holding together a number of different
groups, all jealous of each other, all of whom would fall apart and
probably fight among themselves, if they were not kept under by one
ruler over them. It may be affirmed, broadly, that the structure of
modern Europe, as represented by the massing of the populations into
great homogeneous nations within fixed limits, has now been completely
left behind in the West, and that from the shores of the Adriatic Sea
right across Asia to the Pacific Ocean, the real subdivisions of the
people, the bonds that unite and separate them into different groups,
are denoted by Race and Religion, sometimes by one, sometimes by the
other, occasionally by both.
Our first step over the boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian empire,
proceeding south-east beyond the Danube and the Carpathian mountains,
brings us into the various principalities and provinces that were once
under the dominion of the Ottoman empire, though almost all of them
are now independent of it. Nearly all of them lie in the region south
of the Danube, which is usually known as the Balkan Peninsula. Here
the complexities of race and religion are abundantly manifest, and
these archaic divisions of political society surround us everywhere.
This region has indeed been parcelled out, within our own time, into
territories of diverse States, but this is quite a modern formation,
and the idea of such political citizenship has been very recently
introduced.
If, now, it is asked why, in this corner of South-Eastern Europe, this
medley of internal distinctions, which was the prevailing
characteristic of the ancient world, has been so long preserved, the
answer is that all this country, the Balkan Peninsula, was under the
direct government of the Ottoman empire up to about seventy years ago,
and that most of the provinces were only liberated from the Turkish
yoke in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The effect of the
long dominion of the Turks over this country had been to perpetuate
the state of things which existed when they first conquered it. Their
policy, the policy of all Asiatic empires, was not to consolidate, or
to obliterate differences produced by race and religion, but to
maintain them in order to rule more securely. And here I may quote
from a book recently published under the title of _Turkey in Europe_,
which is unique of its kind, for in no other work can we find so
complete and particular a history of the Balkan lands, or so accurate
a description of the grouping of the people, taken from personal
knowledge and local investigation. The author, who calls himself
Odysseus, reminds us that the Ottoman Sultans acquired these
territories when they were in the confusion and dismemberment which
followed the decay and fall of the Byzantine empire; and he explains
that the Turks, who have been always inferior in number to the
aggregate of their Christian subjects, could hardly have kept up their
dominion if at any time the Christians had united against them. As the
Christians were not converted, religious unification, which in Asia
was the basis of Mohammedan power, was here impossible, so the Turks
divided that they might rule. 'The Turks have thoroughly learned,' he
says, 'and daily put into practice with admirable skill, the lesson
of _divide et impera_, and hence they have always done, and still do,
all in their power to prevent the obliteration of racial, linguistic,
and religious differences.' They have perpetuated and preserved, as if
in a museum, the strange medley that was existing when these lands
were first conquered by Turkish Sultans nearly five hundred years ago.
Their idea of government has always been simply to take tribute and
secure their paramount supremacy. The result has been that the
confusion, intermixture, and rivalry of race and religion is far more
intricate than even in the Austro-Hungarian empire, where the central
government has tried to reconcile and amalgamate. In Turkey, Odysseus
tells us, 'not only is there a medley of races, but the races inhabit,
not different districts, but the same district. Of three villages
within ten miles of one another, one will be Turkish, one Greek, one
Bulgarian--or perhaps one Albanian, one Bulgarian, and one Servian,
each with their own language, dress, and religion, and eight races and
languages may be found in one large town.'
What has been the upshot and consequence of this Turkish system? It
has been to make the Balkan Peninsula a battlefield, during the last
four centuries, of two great militant creeds, Christianity and Islam,
collecting the population into two religious camps; while inside these
two main religious divisions there are manifold subdivisions of race.
Men of the same creed are in different groups of race; nor are the
race-groups always of the same creed, for one section may have become
fanatic Mohammedans, while the rest have adhered to Christianity. The
intermixture is the more complicated because one cannot attempt to
distinguish a race by physical characteristics, by their personal
appearance or features as marking descent from one stock. The
practices of polygamy, slavery, of the purchase of women, and their