7.Of the Discovery of Europe and the Sort of People Who Live in That Part of the World

THERE are twice as many people in Europe as there are in North and South America together. There are more people within the confines of that small continent than in America, Africa and Australia together.Only Asia has a greater number of inhabitants than Europe,950,000,000 against Europe's 550,000,000.These figures are more or less accurate for they were gathered by the International Statistical Institution connected with the League of Nations, a gathering of learned men who are able to consider such matters with a cool and detached eye and who are under no obligation to doctor the returns to please the local pride of any particular country.

According to that same erudite body, the average net increase in population on this planet is 30,000,000 per year. And that is a very serious matter.For at that rate of speed, the population of the world will double itself in about six centuries.And as we still have millions and millions of years to go, l hate to think what conditions will be later on, in the year 19320 or 193200 or 1932000.“Standing room only”in the subway is bad enough.“Standing room only”on our planet would be absolutely unbearable.

And yet that is the prospect before us unless we are willing to face facts and take certain measures before it is too late.

All that however belongs in a handbook on political economy. The question that faces us here is the following:where did these early settlers of the European continent, who were to play such a great role in history, come from, and were they the first to arrive upon the scene?The answer, I regret to say, must be exceedingly vague.Those people probably came from Asia and they probably entered Europe through the gap between the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea and they probably found that earlier races of immigrants and older forms of civilization had preceded them.But until the anthropologists shall have gathered many more data than are now at their disposal, the story of those pre-pre-historic invaders is still too vague to be incorporated in a popular handbook of geography and we must stick to the later arrivals.

Why did they come?For the same reason that made over a hundred million people move from the Old to the New World during the last hundred years—because they were hungry and the lands toward the west offered them a better chance to survive.

These immigrants scrambled all over Europe, as the immigrants of a later day were to scatter all over the great American plains. And in the mad rush for land and for lakes(in those early days, a lake was even more valuable than a piece of land)all traces of“pure racial stock”were speedily lost.Here and there along the more inaccessible parts of the Atlantic sea-shore or in the hidden depths of some obscure mountain valley, a few of the weaker tribes continued to vegetate, proud of their purity of race, but having little else to console them for the loss of touch with the outside world.And therefore when we speak of“race”,today, we have given up all idea of absolute ethnological purity.

We use the expression for the sake of convenience to describe certain large groups of people who happen to speak the same language(more or less);who have a common historical origin(more or less);and who during the last two thousand years of written history have developed certain traits of character and certain modes of thought and social behavior which have made them conscious of belonging to what, for lack of a better word, we continue to call a“racial group”.

According to this notion of race(the x of the algebraic equation, invented solely for the sake of cutting through a thousand difficulties)there are three great racial groups in the Europe of today and half a dozen smaller ones.

There are, first of all, the Germanic races, such as the English, the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Dutch, the Flemish and part of the Swiss. Then the Latin race, including the French, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese and Roumanians.Finally the Slavic races, consisting mainly of the Russians and the Poles, the Czechs, the Serbians and Bulgarians.Together they account for about 93% of the total population.

The rest are a couple of million Magyars or Hungarians, a slightly smaller number of Finns, about a million people of Turkish descent(in the little remnant of the old Turkish Empire around Constantinople)and some three million Jews. Then there are the Greeks, who have been so hopelessly mixed with other“races”that we can only guess at their origin but who are more closely akin to the Germanic group than to any other.Finally the Albanians, also probably of Germanic origin, who now seem a thousand years behind the times but who had been comfortably settled on their present day farms five or six centuries are the first of the Romans and Greeks made their appearance on European territory.And finally the Celts of Ireland, and the Letts and Lithuanians of the Baltic Sea, and the Gypsies, of indefinite number and hazy origin, who are chiefly interesting as an historical warning of what will happen to those who come too late and who arrive just when the last piece of empty land has been occupied by some one else.

So much for the people who populated both mountains and plains of the old continent. Now we must see what they made of their geographical background and what that background in turn, made of them.For out of that struggle grew our modern world.Without it, we would still be like the beasts of the fields.