s, the part where
there is most hope of men of different religions joining together
against the common enemy.

Here then are two ancient races, the Greeks and another race, not
indeed so advanced, so important, or so widely spread, but a race which
equally keeps a real national being. There is also a third ancient
race which survives as a distinct people, though they have for ages
adopted a foreign language. These are the Vlachs or Roumans, the
surviving representatives of the great race, call it Thracian or any
other, which at the beginning of history held the great inland mass of
the Eastern peninsula, with the Illyrians to the west of them and the
Greeks to the south. Every one knows that in the modern principality
of Roumania and in the adjoining parts of the Austro-Hungarian
monarchy, there is to be seen that phenomenon so unique in the East, a
people who not only, as the Greeks did till lately, still keep the
Roman name, but who speak neither Greek nor Turkish, neither Slave nor
Skipetar, but a dialect of Latin, a tongue akin, not to the tongues of
any of their neighbors, but to the tongues of Gaul, Italy, and Spain.
And any one who has given any real attention to this matter knows that
the same race is to be found, scattered here and there, if in some
parts only as wandering shepherds, in the Slavonic, Albanian, and Greek
lands south of the Danube. The assumption has commonly been that this,
outlying Romance people owe their Romance character to the Roman
colonization of Dacia under Trajan. In this view, the modern Roumans
would be the descendants of Trajan's colonists and of Dacians who had
learned of them to adopt the speech and manners of Rome. But when we
remember that Dacia was the first Roman province to be given up--that
the modern Roumania was for ages the highway of every barbarian tribe
on its way from the East to the West--that the land has been conquered
and settled and forsaken over and over again--it would be passing
strange if this should be the one land, and its people the one race, to
keep the Latin tongue when it has been forgotten in all the neighboring
countries. In fact, this idea has been completely dispersed by modern
research. The establishment of the Roumans in Dacia is of
comparatively recent date, beginning only in the thirteenth century.
The Roumans of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transsilvania, are isolated
from the scattered Rouman remnant on Pindos and elsewhere. They
represen