the Eastern Empire; but no Teutonic settlement was ever made within its bounds, no lasting Teutonic settlement was ever made even on its border. The part of the Teuton in the West was played far less perfectly indeed by the Slave in the East. On the points of likeness and unlikeness between the part played by the Teutons in the West and that played by the Slaves in the East, I cannot enlarge here. The great point to be borne in mind is that the Slave in the East does answer, however imperfectly, to the Teuton in the West, that he is there what the Teuton is here, the great representative of what we may call the modern European races, those whose part in history began after the establishment of the Roman power. The differences with which we are here concerned between the position of the two races are chiefly these. The Slave in the East has, as we have seen, pre-Roman races standing alongside of him in a way in which the Teuton has not in the West. He also himself stands alongside of races which have come in since his own coming, in a way which the Teuton in the West is still further from doing. That is to say, besides Greeks, Albanians, and Roumans, he stands alongside of Bulgarians, Magyars, and Turks, who have nothing to answer to them in the West. We might also say that there is nothing in the East exactly answering to the Romance nations in the West. There are no people, Latin or Greek in speech, who have been brought under Slavonic influences in the same way in which the Romance nations have been brought under Teutonic influences. We might say that the Greeks answer to the Welsh in both senses of the word, at once to the Celtic and to the Latin-speaking people of western Europe. The causes of all these differences I hope to explain in another shape; we have now to deal only with the differences themselves. The Slave, in the time of his coming, in the nature of his settlement, answers roughly to the Teuton; his position is what that of the Teuton would be, if western Europe had been brought under the power of an alien race at some time later than his own settlement. The Slaves undoubtedly form the greatest element in the population of the Eastern Peninsula, and they once reached more widely still. Taking the Slavonic name in its widest meaning, they occupy all the lands from the Danube and its great tributaries southward to the strictly Greek border. The exceptions are where earlier races remain, Greek or Italian on the coast-line, Albanian in the mountains. The Slaves hold the heart of the peninsula, and they hold more than the peninsula itself. Here comes in a fact which bears very distinctly on the politics of the present moment, the fact that the present frontier of the Austrian and Ottoman empires, a frontier so dear in the eyes of diplomatists, is no natural or historical frontier at all, but simply comes of the wars of the last century. The Slave lives equally on both sides of it; indeed, but for the last set of causes which have affected eastern Europe, the Slave might have reached uninterruptedly from the Baltic to the Ægæan.
This last set of causes are those which specially distinguish the histories of eastern and of western Europe, those which have caused the special difficulties of the last five hundred years. In western Europe, though we have had plenty of political conquests, we have had no national migrations since the days of the Teutonic settlements — at least, if we may extend these last so as to take in the Scandinavian settlements in Britain and Gaul. The Teuton has pressed to the East at the expense of the Slave and the Old Prussian: the borders between the Romance and the Teutonic nations in the West have fluctuated; but no third set of nations has come in, strange alike to the Roman and the Teuton and to the whole Aryan family. As the Huns of Attila showed themselves in western Europe as passing ravagers, so did the Magyars at a later day; so did the Ottoman Turks in a day later still, when they besieged Vienna and laid waste the Venetian mainland. But all these Turanian invaders appeared in western Europe simply as passing invaders; in eastern Europe their part has been widely different. Besides the temporary dominion of Avars, Patzinaks, Chazars, Cumans, and a crowd of others, three bodies of more abiding settlers, the Bulgarians, the Magyars, and the Mogul conquerors of Russia, have come in by one path; a fourth, the Ottoman Turks, have come in by another path. Among all these invasions we have one case of thorough assimilation, and only one. The original Finnish Bulgarians, like Western conquerors, have been lost among Slavonic subjects and neighbors; the modern Bulgarian is a Slave bearing the Bulgarian name, as the modern French is a Gaul bearing the Frankish name. The geographical function of the Magyar has been to keep the two great groups of Slavonic nations apart. To his coming, more than to any other cause, we may attribute the great
