of that region a privileged position amid a subject population of Rumanian peasants.[1] In Russia a chain of German settlements lies eastward through the north of the Ukraine almost to Kieff. Only on the Middle Volga, about the city of Saratof, do we come to the last patch of these German colonists
We must not, however, think of German influence among the Slavs as being limited to these extensions of the German tongue, though they are a very powerful factor—since German Kultur has gone wherever the German language has given it entry. The Slav kingdom of Bohemia was completely incorporated into the German Imperial System; the King of Bohemia was one of the Electors of the Emperor under the constitution which came to an end only in 1806, after the battle of Austerlitz. The Poles, the Czechs, the South Slavs of Croatia, and the Magyars are Roman Catholic—that is to say, of the Latin or Western branch of the Church, and this has certainly meant an extension of German influence as against the Greek Church of the Russians. After the siege of Vienna in 1683, the Austrian Germans advanced step by step
- ↑ The statements here made are left in the form that held before the War, for the memory of them is more potent than the as yet vague re-grouping of the future.
