lame for this; for the Roundheads of
prehistoric and of modern Europe are as contentious matter as their
English namesakes in the seventeenth century.

To this broadly threefold analysis of European man, add only this, that
ever since the old 'Sarmatian' sea shrank to its present dimensions and
left the grasslands open between Tienshan and the Carpathians, there has
been a steady westward movement of Mongoloid folk until a strong enough
Muscovy was interposed; and that along the Northern Woodland also there
has been westward movement, slower but no less persistent; and it will
be clear that it is not to race that we have to look for any uniform
basis of our European culture.

Nor is such a basis to be found in Language. People often speak of
Indo-European speech as though they really confused linguistic affinity
with mutual intelligibility. But if you want to test the unifying
influence of kindred languages, get a Welshman, a German, a Russian, and
a Greek into a room together, and see what the 'concert of Europe'
amounts to. The odds are that if they confer at all, they will do so in
French, which is in the strict sense of the word a 'modern' language;
while if you allowed them to write and gave them time, there is just a
chance that the Greek would impose his language on the other three.

There is no need to labour this point further than to recall the
fateful bisection of the culture of the European peninsula which
resulted from the linguistic alienation of Constantinople from Rome; of
the Mediterranean base which understood Latin, from that which thought
in Greek. In this tragic respect, which the Turkish conquest, with its
linguistic and religious sequel, has done little more than aggravate,
Europe ends still at the Save; whereas Rome's greatest daughters have
reconquered more than all that Carthage ever held in Africa. And the
re-incorporation of Britain, too, into the comity of nations is
concurrent with the Latinization of its speech, on which the seal was
set in 1611. Late as it was, then, in any case, in the prehistory of the
region, the spread of a single type of linguistic structure over Europe
has brought not peace, but a sword.

What then of Religion? How far were the older ethnologists on the right
lines, when (in spite of language, rather than aided by it) they
co-ordinated their own Olympus with the confederate polytheisms of the
North? Here, too, we have to keep the dates in mind, and clear ourselve