though the scholar may at once see that they are
closely akin, may not be so closely akin as to be mutually intelligible
for common purposes. A hundred years back the Servian might have cried
for help to the Russian on the ground of common Orthodox faith; he would
hardly have called for help on the ground of common Slavonic speech and
origin. If he had done so, it would have been rather by way of grasping
at any chance, however desperate or far-fetched, than as putting forward
a serious and well understood claim which he might expect to find
accepted and acted on by large masses of men. He might have received
help, either out of genuine sympathy springing from community of faith
or from the baser thought than he could be made use of as a convenient
political tool. He would have got but little help purely on the ground
of a community of blood and speech which had had no practical result for
ages. When Russia in earlier days interfered between the Turk and his
Christian subjects, there is no sign of any sympathy felt or possessed
for Slavs as Slavs. Russia dealt with Montenegro, not, as far as one
can see, out of any Slavonic brotherhood, but because an independent
Orthodox state at enmity with the Turk could not fail to be a useful
ally. The earlier dealings of Russia with the subject nations were far
more busy among the Greeks than among the Slavs. In fact, till quite
lately, all the Orthodox subjects of the Turk were in most European eyes
looked on as alike Greeks. The Orthodox Church has been commonly known
as the Greek Church; and it has often been very hard to make people
understand that the vast mass of the members of that so-called Greek
Church are not Greek in any other sense. In truth we may doubt whether,
till comparatively lately, the subject nations themselves were fully
alive to the differences of race and speech among them. A man must in
all times and places know whether he speaks the same language as another
man; but he does not always go on to put his consciousness of difference
into the shape of a sharply drawn formula. Still less does he always
make the difference the ground of any practical course of action. The
Englishman in the first days of the Norman Conquest felt the hardships
of foreign rule, and he knew that those hardships were owing to foreign
rule. But he had not learned to put his sense of hardship into any
formula about an oppressed nationality. So, when the policy of the Turk
found that the