5
Some Peoples intermediate between Romance and
Germanic in speech
Having now referred to Italians, French, and Germans, it seems appropriate to invite consideration of the Swiss people, so marked a unit in European life in spite of differences of language, religion, and economic activity. A very early but apparently incomplete development of the settled life on lake shores was correlated with a good deal of seasonal and other migration of people using the hill pastures in summer and developing dairying activities. Feudal localism came in as on the more open areas round about, but did not take such root as it did on the richer plains, so that though, with exceptions, the form of speech approximated to that of surrounding lands (Italian, French, and Alemannic), political domination by the surrounding lands was strongly and, in the end, successfully resisted. The landed aristocracy in the end either left the poor territory (parts of Neuchatel) or gave up their privileges and merged in the people as leaders (especially in French and German Switzerland); they had to be a noblesse de campagne rather than a noblesse de cour, and the fate of the former, even in France, but much more in Norway and in Finland, has been to merge itself in the people. There has been a persistence of localism without the accompaniment of feudalism, and the cantons have democratized their government to a remarkable degree, developing pacific ideals combined with zeal for local defence. They now furnish a most interesting example of a strong union for defensive purposes with little possibility of the passing of defence into aggression. Centuries of poverty have led to emigration and to a keenness on intellectual equipment paralleled in Scotland, Denmark, and modern Wales, but reaching a unique level in Switzerland with its seven institutions of university rank and their relatively enormous student population. The value of the Swiss Universities has brought them students from all over the world, and the hospitality of Switzerland to refugees and to tourists has made the country a most important international centre, as the Red Cross and the League of Nations head-quarters testify. Side by side with this has grown the importance of Switzerland as a banking centre, this line of work being much promoted by the growing tension in economic relations in Europe, due to the huge development of militarist aggression since 1895. Another aspect of this development of banking has been that connected with the industrial transformation of several parts of Switzerland through application of hydro-electric power, a process which has brought Switzerland into closer relation with South Germany and North Italy, and has made her external commerce an important matter. It need hardly be said that Switzerland's hospitality to refugees has brought her craftsmen, thinkers, and artists for centuries, and has thus enormously enriched her life. The debts of Holland and of the British Isles to refugees from the intellectual elite of other lands may be compared with that of Switzerland. In Britain the families at the centre of the commercial and intellectual life of our cities are often closely bound up with groups of refugees, as their association with Unitarian Churches and the Society of Friends often shows.
Another region which may appropriately be treated after consideration of the Romance and the German Teutonic peoples is the British Isles. Reference has already been made to the British and Irish peoples in the chapter on races and the section on the Celtic languages. It was there suggested that these islands were a remote fringing region in ancient times, and as such retain old types of long-headed men, with comparatively little alteration, such as the types of Combe Capelle man of Aurignacian times, the related river-bed types, and the long-barrow types of later, but probably still pre-Bronze Age, times.
At the dawn of the Bronze Age came others, mainly broad-headed types, among whom we can distinguish the brawny, rough-browed 'Beaker-making' people found in the round barrows and surviving, much refined in some cases, in the modern population, the strongly built and sometimes tall, dark broad-heads still found on patches along our western coasts and around the coasts of Ireland, and provisionally identified with the prospectors for tin and copper who spread from the eastern Mediterranean in the third and perhaps the second millennium before Christ, the broad-heads of the short cist graves of our east coasts especially from the Humber to Caithness, the tall longer-headed people of the Iron Age (La Tene) movements, and the descendants of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Vikings, all more or less tall and fair, and for the most part long-headed. The Norman Conquest seems to have brought in broad-heads from across the Channel, as one judges from contents of mediaeval ossuaries, which sometimes contrast strikingly with the modern populations of their districts. It seems likely that the growth of modern industrialism has led to a resurgence of the older and dark long-headed types, which seem able to withstand the evil conditions of the slums to some extent, while the tall, fair long-heads and the descendants of the beaker-makers seem inclined to drift off, unless circumstances allow them to rise to a position of leadership and comfort.
The study of language shows how completely Teutonic speech replaced Celtic, even as regards names of settlements, on the English plain, though eager etymology may have exaggerated this completeness and may have unduly emphasized the change of population supposed to be involved. The fractionation of old elements among the Welsh hills has permitted the old language to survive, though it is now spoken not so much by the physical heirs of the people who brought it to Britain as by the older stocks to whom they taught it. The openness and good centres of the Central Lowland of Scotland were unfavourable to the survival of Celtic, which it was so hard to mingle with Teutonic speech, but this compact region, well marked off from the English plain by the southern uplands, the Cheviots, and the moorlands of north England, kept a sufficient organization (largely of the Celtic Church) through the post-Roman centuries to hand on many of the old place-names and to develop an organized national consciousness at the earliest opportunity. Wales, lacking an administrative centre, has lost its law but kept its language. Scotland, with the great centres of its Central Lowland, has developed its own law, but its old languages are almost gone.
History follows out for us the growth of national consciousness on the English plain in Plantagenet times right up to its organization under the Tudors and its great outburst under Elizabeth, when the common revolt of the English plain and central Scotland against Rome drew the two historic units towards one another, helped by community of language and by the weakening of old ties between Lowland Scotland and Catholic Bourbon France. The rise of industrialism may be said to have consummated the union, albeit with an attendant loss of valuable elements of the population in the events following eighteenth-century highland rebellions and nineteenth-century evictions for the creation of deer forests. The remnants of old-time people and ways in the western Highlands and the Hebrides are nevertheless interesting and important from several points of view; they preserve valuable elements of traditional civilization, and possibly even distinctive spiritual faculties, which our industrial civilization seems to kill, or at any rate to damp down.
Ireland, it will be seen, was not led to co-operation with England in at all the same ways, and it also illustrates the diversity which is so apt to persist in off-shore islands, largely because of the diverse outlooks of their different shores (compare Ceylon, Java, Crete, &c.). In the case of Ireland the poverty of its centre has played a great part in maintaining disunion. But neither was it led to revolt against Rome along with England and Scotland, nor was it transformed as they were by industrialism, save in its north-east corner. So, mutatis mutandis, the small, if interesting survivals of old tradition and feeling noticed in the western Highlands are the characteristic of large areas of Ireland, and its Catholicism has been ever deeper rooted in the people's minds by the bitterly cruel persecutions maintained by England. The net result has thus been, as in Czechoslovakia, a tendency to redevelop separate and antagonistic national consciousness, and to make it likely that association rather than subordination is the line of solution of this difficult problem. The openness of Ireland to the sea and her many connexions with the Continent seem to have been, along with repressive politics, causes of loss of native language which, in any case, would have been difficult to adjust to modern needs, so that Ireland is a case of nationality in which the language basis is not a real vital fact, however much enthusiasts may try to insist on it. But apart from this the cases of Ireland and Czechoslovakia are remarkably analogous; the latter is as much within striking distance of the German centres as Ireland is within striking distance of us, they both have an industrial element which finds it difficult to co-operate with the agricultural majority and claims separate treatment, both look back to centuries of unhappy memories of undoubted wrongs, and both have strong claims on the thoughts of those who desire peace.
The Scottish people have found a modus vivendi, and with the recent growth of toleration a modus vivendi has almost been attained for the Welsh people, but in any case the matter of Wales is different from that of Ireland; the language difference in Wales does not cut so deep as the religious difference in Ireland, and the industrialized population is a majority in Wales, but a minority in Ireland. The gradation of Welsh into English on the Welsh side of the border is another important factor in the case of Wales, and that country is becomingly increasingly able to develop the spiritual heritage of her rural areas in pacific fashion. With moderation on the part of England there seems hope that Great Britain may thus be able to maintain and develop a scheme of unity-in-diversity, and recent developments hold out hopes for Ireland too.
Man with its Gaelic and Norse elements, the Hebrides with their immemorial survivals, Orkney and Shetland with their Norse background, are all of great interest to the ethnologist, and contribute interesting diversities to the enrichment of British civilization, but hardly constitute serious problems.