But in Ireland, even more than in Bohemia, and more than in any other western European country, there existed in the eighteenth century two peoples of whom one formed the dominant caste, separated from one another by barriers of race, of religion, and, for a time, of language.
The Baltic provinces of Russia occur to one as in some sort a parallel. As Ireland is the most westerly, so are these provinces the most easterly part of Europe where a dominant aristocracy of Germanic blood has brought an alien race under its power without either exterminating it or assimilating it. In Ireland the colonist is marked off from the native by race and religion, but the language of the former has been adopted by the latter. In the Baltic provinces the two elements are separate in race and in language, but the peasantry of Lettish or Esthonian blood has the same Lutheran religion as its masters. And both landowner and peasant have over them a foreign master differing from them both in race, in religion and in language.
"Local landownership and autonomy," said a Russian lecturer recently, "are almost entirely in the hands of the nobility, whereas at least 75 per cent, of the peasantry have till now remained landless. … The economic and legal privileges of the nobility naturally served as an inexhaustible source of discontent in the region and not infrequently led to undesirable excesses."[1]
It seems then that there has been less fusion in the Baltic provinces than in Ireland. The barrier of language has been very great, and though
- ↑ Times'' Russian Supplement, Oct. 30, 1915.
