which sounds absurd
in the West, but which has its exact parallel in many parts of the East.
Let us suppose that in a journey through England we came successively to
districts, towns, or villages, where we found, one after another, first,
Britons speaking Welsh; then Romans speaking Latin; then Saxons or
Angles speaking an older form of our own tongue; then Scandinavians
speaking Danish; then Normans speaking Old-French; lastly perhaps a
settlement of Flemings, Huguenots, or Palatines, still remaining a
distinct people and speaking their own tongue. Or let us suppose a
journey through Northern France, in which we found at different stages,
the original Gaul, the Roman, the Frank, the Saxon of Bayeux, the Dane
of Coutances, each remaining a distinct people, each of them keeping the
tongue which they first brought with them into the land. Let us suppose
further that, in many of these cases, a religious distinction was added
to a national distinction. Let us conceive one village Roman Catholic,
another Anglican, others Nonconformist of various types, even if we do
not call up any remnants of the worshippers of Jupiter or of Woden. All
this seems absurd in any Western country, and absurd enough it is. But
the absurdity of the West is the living reality of the East. There we
may still find all the chief races which have ever occupied the country,
still remaining distinct, still keeping separate tongues, and those for
the most part, their own original tongues. Within the present and late
European dominions of the Turk, the original races, those whom we find
there at the first beginnings of history, are all there still, and two
of them keep their original tongues. They form three distinct nations.
First of all there are the Greeks. We have not here to deal with them as
the representatives of that branch of the Roman Empire which adopted
their speech, but simply as one of the original elements in the
population of the Eastern peninsula. Known almost down to our own day by
their historical name of Romans, they have now fallen back on the name
of Hellenes. And to that name they have a perfectly good claim. If the
modern Greeks are not all true Hellenes, they are an aggregate of
adopted Hellenes gathered round and assimilated to a true Hellenic
kernel. Here we see the oldest recorded inhabitants of a large part of
the land abiding, and abiding in a very different case from the remnants
of the Celt and the Iberian in Western Europe.