rise and spread of two powerful missionary and militant religions. First came Christianity to overspread the lands which the empire had levelled politically. Islam followed in the seventh century, and the conflict between these two rival faiths, each claiming universal spiritual dominion, altered not only the spiritual but also the temporal order of things in Europe and Western Asia.

In Asia the victorious creed of Mahomed imposed upon immense multitudes a religious denomination; they became Mussulmans. In Western Europe the dominion of the Roman empire had by this time fallen to pieces; it was torn asunder by barbarian invaders; but upon the ruins of that empire was built up the great Catholic Church of Rome, which gathered together all races of the West under the common denomination of Christianity. Beneath the canopies of these two great religions the primitive grouping of the people survived; throughout Europe there were no settled kingdoms or nations, but a jumble of races and tribes contending for land and power. Now we know that in Western Europe this strife and confusion of the Middle Ages at last ended in the formation, on a large scale, of separate nationalities, and perhaps we may take, roughly, the end of the fifteenth century as the period when the great territorial kingdoms were definitely marked out, and when the rulers were rounding off their possessions under designations that may be called national. In these countries the sub-divisions according to race had now lost almost all political significance; but in the sixteenth century another great disturbing element reappeared. The great wars of religion again made a fresh division of the people into two camps of Roman Catholics and Protestants. This ferment has gradually subsided, and at the

present time all minor groups of the population in Western Europe have been absorbed under large national designations; the nations are marked off within clearly cut frontiers, and separated by the paramount distinction of languages. In Western Europe you do not now define a man by his original race or by his religion, you ask whose natural-born subject he is, in whose territory he lives, and you class him accordingly as French, English, Spanish or Italian.

My

Now it has been, I think, one result of this consolidation of the West into States and Nationalities, with religion mostly corresponding to the region, that the persistence in other parts of the world of the earlier ideas of race and religion, the primordial grouping of mankind, has been far too commonly overlooked and undervalued. present object is to lay stress on the importance of realizing and understanding them. And I may begin by throwing out the suggestion that this oversight, this neglect of ideas and facts that still have great strength and vitality, may be connected with the influence, in France and England, of a certain school of political philosophy that arose in the eighteenth century, in France. The Encyclopédistes, as they were called, because their leaders wrote the celebrated French Encyclopædia, treated in theory all notions of separate races, religions, and frontiers as so many barriers against the spread of a common civilization, which was to unite all peoples on general principles of reason, scientific knowledge, and emancipation from local or national prejudices. As a theory this might not have had much practical effect; but at the end of the eighteenth century came the French Revolution, when these philosophical notions took a very seriously practical shape; for the French Republican armies invaded the kingdoms of Western Europe with the

war-cry of universal fraternity and equality. Revolutionary France ignored both race and religion. It proclaimed, De Tocqueville says, above and instead of all peculiar nationalities, an intellectual citizenship that was intended to include the people of every country to which it extended, superseding all distinctions of language, tradition, and national character. Under Napoleon this fierce impulse of democratic levelling was transformed into Imperialism: he aimed at restoring an Empire in 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 Encyclopédistes 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 se rious 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 sub-divisions of the two chief races. The Slavonic populations in the northwest 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 them

selves 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, endeavoring 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 centralization-it is centrifugal and separatist; and if it continues to increase in force it may threaten with dissolution an ancient and powerful Empire.

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 sub-divisions 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

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 Mahomedan 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 sub-divisions 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 Mahomedans, 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 capture in the interminable wars, have produced incessant crossing of breeds. It is not often understood or remembered that in former times a tribe or band of foreign in-, vaders, when they had to cross the sea or to make long expeditions, very rarely brought women with them. So when they settled on the conquered lands they must have intermarried, forcibly or otherwise, with the subject race. If they massacred the men, the women were part of their booty. Neither is the test of language a sure

one, though it is the best we have, and is becoming more and more the criterion of race; for a kind of struggle for existence goes on among the languages, they spread or contract under various influences, mainly political. The folk may change their language as they may change their creed; and, what is more remarkable, they may even change their race. According to the book I have just quoted, the Ottoman Government classes all its subject population into religious communities. Whatever be a man's race or language, if he professes Islam, he is called a Mahomedan; if he is of the orthodox Greek Church at Constantinople, he is Greek or Rûmi, for Stambul was the capital of the Roman empire; or else he is Katholik, Armenian, or Jew, according to his creed, not according to his birthplace or his blood. So the official designations are religious, while the popular usage is various, sometimes following race, sometimes creed, and it is still constantly shifting, as I shall presently try to explain.

And here it may be interesting to mention a peculiarity of the growth and constitution of the Eastern or Greek Church, in contrast with the Western Church of Rome. The Roman Church has always claimed universality-it has ignored and attempted to trample down all political and national divisions; it demands of all Roman Catholics, whoever they may be, submission to the supreme spiritual dictation of the Roman pontiff, and those who accept any other authority are outside the pale. From the beginning the Roman Catholic Church has made incessant war upon every kind of heresy or dissent, transforming the old rites and worships where they could not be exterminated. It proclaims independence of the State, it has no local centres or national branches. The Pope at Rome claims