des of what is or was the frontier of the Austrian and Ottoman
empires; indeed, but for another set of causes which have affected
eastern Europe, the Slave might have reached uninterruptedly from the
Baltic to the Aegaean.

This last set of causes are those which specially distinguish the
histories of eastern and of western Europe; a set of causes which,
though exactly twelve hundred years old,[5] are still fresh and living,
and which are the special causes which have aggravated the special
difficulties of the last five hundred years. In Western Europe, though
we have had plenty of political conquests, we have had no national
migrations since the days of the Teutonic settlements--at least, if we
may extend these last so as to take in the Scandinavian settlements in
Britain and Gaul. The Teuton has pressed to the East at the expense of
the Slave and the Old-Prussian: the borders between the Romance and the
Teutonic nations in the West have fluctuated; but no third set of
nations has come in, strange alike to the Roman and the Teuton and to
the whole Aryan family. As the Huns of Attila showed themselves in
western Europe as passing ravagers, so did the Magyars at a later day;
so did the Ottoman Turks in a day later still, when they besieged
Vienna and laid waste the Venetian mainland. But all these Turanian
invaders appeared in western Europe simply as passing invaders; in
eastern Europe their part has been widely different. Besides the
temporary dominion of Avars, Patzinaks, Chazars, Cumans, and a crowd of
others, three bodies of more abiding settlers, the Bulgarians, the
Magyars, and the Mongol conquerors of Russia, have come in by one path;
a fourth, the Ottoman Turks, have come in by another path. Among all
these invasions we have one case of thorough assimilation, and only
one. The original Finnish Bulgarians have, like Western conquerors,
been lost among Slavonic subjects and neighbors. The geographical
function of the Magyar has been to keep the two great groups of
Slavonic nations apart. To his coming, more than to any other cause,
we may attribute the great historical gap which separates the Slave of
the Baltic from his southern kinsfolk. The work of the Ottoman Turk we
all know. These latter settlers remain alongside of the Slave, just as
the Slave remains alongside of the earlier settlers. The Slavonized
Bulgarians are the only instance of assimilation such as we are used to
in the West. All the ot